I hope it is okay that I respond to a posting a while back in the discussion, but there were so many comments in the course of the debate that I wasn't sure where to begin. I have not really been using Tryton, only experimenting with it, but I do have some potentially useful experiences from my former work in not-for-profit, and of course in the Free Software community. First, the question of representation: My former employer used an Individual member ($125), Corporate member ($750) and Sustaining member ($2000) structure. Figures just mentioned to indicate the proportions. A Corporate member would have 4 representatives, a Sustaining member would have 8. These representatives were allowed to participate in the events and were treated like 8 Individual members were when it came to influence. So an organisation would openly be represented by these members, and this also acknowledged the contribution. There were no problems with companies sponsoring individual memberships for one. It did not actually have to be individuals in that respect, just one-person-memberships.
With a system as Tryton it would make no sense at all to exclude companies. Noone would be more interested in the evolution of a system like Tryton. As for the GPL plugins, I would assume the situation is similar to the Wordpress discussion: http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/ The discussion of what constitutes a derivative or tied-in extension is not particularly easy, but either way: It is only with distribution that the code requires to go back. If you do consulting for a company and extend their systems in-house, it would not have this requirement. Being under a wider umbrella with a wider-reaching foundation does not make sense if the point is protecting the Tryton brand aspects. It does make sense to set up a legal entity, however. And there is no problem with partnering with other foundations for marketing and integration. Sincerely, Morten __ Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér [email protected] * www.syntaktisk.dk -- [email protected] mailing list
