Ed, On 26.10.2012 02:10, Ed Loach wrote:
If so, then the OSMF has members rather than shareholders, and I'm not sure there is provision in Company Law to allow corporations to be members
It is quite likely that this is the case, but I don't expect the legal status of OSMF to be fixed, and intended my question to be asking for what people would like, not what people would assume to be legally possible under current circumstances.
For example, we have seen a bit of discussion about the "membership register" and if and how it must be public; superficial reading of the Companies Act seems to suggest that the home address of each OSMF member must be revealed to everyone who comes asking. If this is true then maybe it is a certain barrier to membership, (I would be interested to hear how British Mensa deal with that - if I write to them asking for the list of members with home address, what will they say? Can you find out?)
If, on closer inspection, being incorporated in the UK should turn out to be a problem or not give use the flexibility we would like, there's no reason why we would have to stick with being a UK company limited by guarantee forever. I think that, in the whole "what do we want from OSMF" discussion, we will first define our goals, then see if they are possible with the form of organisation we currently have, and then change that form if it is necessary to do what we want.
But I didn't intend to start this discussion here and now; I think it is much too early for that.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
