Riley:
I'm glad that you found my suggestion useful and chose to use it. Thanks as
well.
>*I don't see any harm in continuing to accept donations during the public
comments period, even if the escrow service wouldn't start until the end of
it (which, coincidentally, would seem to be the end of the FSF's campaign). I
might be missing something extremely obvious, though, so tell me if I am. :)
I may have not explained myself correctly. In my proposal, the escrow
would begin to receive donations on your behalf when the public comments
period begins (Hence that I suggested to wait until the FSF fundraising ends,
and that also gives you time to have found people for the escrow). I think
that you understood that my proposal was to open the escrow for donations
after the public comments period. This would also work, but it doesn't given
people who would donate only through a third party the option to donate that
way immediately; they'd have to hold the money until the public comments
period ends; this is of course, also a matter of judgement and it isn't
critical whether to open the escrow for donations when the comments period
begins or ends.
Of course, you need not stop accepting donations at any point. You can accept
donations directly and through the escrow at the same time, and leave the
choice on which way to donate to the donnors' discrection.
I don't know if the FSF would be willing to act as an escrow, but it's fine
that you asked. I suggest that you continue seeking people to act as the
escrow, for instance, by asking in places where free software supporters tend
to meet (Such as here, especially if you start a new thread) or in the
mailing lists. I see that you made the announcement in gnu-linux-libre, so
mentioning the plan of using an escrow and asking for volunteers that have
substantially contributed to free software is a good continuation; you can
link to this thread. You can also ask free software supporters directly. Some
may recommend you other people to whom you may ask, and so on, recursively. I
can think of:
Sylvain Beucler , : long-time administrator of GNU Savannh, who has since
left that position.
Yoni Rabkin : long-time developer of GNU free software (see his web site),
and also volunteers to answer the mails at [email protected].
Rubén, the founder and main developer (I think) of Trisquel. He's usually on
#trisquel in irc.freenode.net as “quidam”.
Matt Lee : Campaigns manager of the FSF. “mattl” on Freenode.
Karl Berry : I don't know what he does exactly, but some years ago he was
often the one to reply when I wrote to the GNU and FSF contact e-mail
addresses and he also participated sometimes in GNU Savannah.
I'm not listing Richard Stallman because he is likely too busy to act as
escrow, but you can ask him anyway, or ask him instead for people who may
want to act as escrow.
There's a lot of people that you can ask to act as escrow, or you can ask for
people who may want to act as escrow. I have to go right now, so I didn't
write about more people; I may also have left several writing errors for the
same reason. Also try the fully free distribution mailing lists and consider
writing to the OpenBSD mailing lists or forums, but expect a mostly negative
answer since that people don't tend to care about ethics of software; some
may say something productive, however.
I also don't like the philosphy of *BSD people and what they're doing of
writing permissive alternatives to copylefted programs, such as GCC, etc...
since it wastes an opportunity to push free software for people who may use
it on purely practical concerns. However, LibertyBSD doesn't do this as far
as I understand, instead it offers to take that existing software and make it
possible to use it without use the proprietary software that the OpenBSD
people added as well, so I hope it succeds in doing what I think it will do.
