It's been only a bit more than a day since we officially created the
SharpOS Provisional Governance Board, but we've been very busy.

The board voted in a proposal to adopt the initial policy that I
wrote, which was the first piece of official policy for the SharpOS
project. The policy recognizes the powers of the board, outlines
procedure for adding new members, and discussion/voting. Six out of
seven votes were cast, and the decision to adopt it was unanimous.

We adopted a proposal that outlines time frames for completing
motions. A motion only lasts as long as less than half of the board
has voted on it. Normally motions have 30 days before they expire (and
are acted upon), but they may also be marked as "Express" or "ASAP"
motions. Express motions have a time limit of 7 days, and ASAP motions
have a limit of 3 days. Five votes were counted, unanimously adopting
the proposal.

One board member (Michael Schurter) relinquished his seat on the
SharpOS board. He did so by unsubscribing to the list, I believe as a
response to the reminder email I sent to the inactive board members.
We've also acted on the first request to join the board, from Chad Z
Hower. The board denied the request, with five votes counted,
unanimous.

There are still a few proposals pending right now. One requests the
use of parliamentary procedure to speed things up and make sure things
get edited before voting.

A discussion is currently happening about creating a preliminary
position for new members of the board, where membership has either a
limit or is more susceptible to revocation.

Beyond completing the remaining membership requests, there is still
more work to be done:
- We should define positions on the board such as secretary (for
tracking accountability, keeping records, and maintaining the display
of board information on the website) and chairman (for breaking ties,
summing completed motions, and as a central point for contacting the
board / PR),
- We should round out the SharpOS policy related to the board and
adopt the policy as the bylaws which govern us (input from the
community is needed a lot here on what is deemed most important). The
bylaws part itself is not strictly necessary, but it would reason
spreading the affected policies into a new BoardBylaws wiki, help
discussion by letting us just refer to it as "the bylaws" instead of
"the official policy regarding the board" or so.

This is just my personal list, but I think we'll be at a point where
we can begin working on licensing, which is one of the biggest reasons
we did it. I believe all of the people who hold copyrights to the
SharpOS code are on the provisional board, which will speed up the
process significantly. But I want the heart of the matter (what
license do we pick?) to be talked about _here_ and not on the board
list. The decision deeply affects anyone who wants to contribute code.
In previous discussions I think the MPL license looked to be the
smoothest choice among the people involved. Does this really hold
true? Do you think the MPL is a good choice for licensing SharpOS?
There was also talk about adding an attribution clause alongside the
MPL license if we choose it (and call the licensing combo MPL with
Attribution).

Dual licensing: we've typically talked about dual licensing on 2 very
different licenses, such as GPL and BSD or a similar permissive
license. This is only one case, and I'd like to remind the group about
doing combinations of _similar_ licenses, which makes things much
easier when trying to combine two pieces of code with similar but not
equal licensing. For instance, MPL/GPL dual licensing would allow the
code to be used in the more permissive, weak copyleft manner, and also
allow developers of GPL projects to use our code. This doesn't mean
that the code is locked under the GPL (quite the opposite), nor does
it mean that GPL licensed code can be added to SharpOS, but it does
mean that more open source projects can make use of our code while not
sacrificing commercial developers and interest.

Please discuss, comment, and flame :)

-- 
fury

long name: William Lahti
handle :: fury
freenode :: xfury
blog :: http://xfurious.blogspot.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
Still grepping through log files to find problems?  Stop.
Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >>  http://get.splunk.com/
_______________________________________________
SharpOS-Developers mailing list
SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers

Reply via email to