Board/Meetings/20090408

From openSUSE

Board Meeting April 08 6-7:45pm UTC Federico Mena Quintero (federico1) Hendrik Vogelsang (henne) Michael Löffler (michl) Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKs) Pascal Bleser (yaloki)

Status of old action items

• AI henne, create board blog a spotlight.opensuse.org

WIP - henne works on getting the url and creates then accounts

• AI all, Member approval

shame on us, we've been pretty slow in approvals. All promised to go ahead step by step.

Trademark guide lines

- for feeback please use: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Trademark_Guidelines_use_cases - michl had a conversation with zonker that we should once again asking activly for feeback, give time for feedback and go ahead, it looks like a summer task

Improvment of IRC cloak and email address handling

- yaloki and suseROCKs are now side admins, darix will train them (but doesn't know about that yet)

openSUSE Foundation

creation of a german foundation (e.V.)

• its just some paper work, it needs for the beginning 7 founding members, the pure cost is not higher than $ 150 -> doable

Pro: - we can do what we want and are our own master

Con: - all paperwork and ongoing effort needs to be handled by us

yaloki put together some information about http://www.spi-inc.org/about-spi

Pros:

• they take care of the legal shmoo
• they can provide legal assistance if needed
• their board is elected, and we could have someone join their organization + follow all the discussions, including private ones
• donations to SPI (and hence to openSUSE) would be tax-deducible in the USA
• donations can be made in Germany through a NFP (non-for-profit) there (ffii), as well as in Italy
• they have an online form for donating

Cons:

• SPI owns the money, but transfers to us, as long as it doesn't conflict with SPI's legal status (a NFP)
• SPI also owns assets (e.g. hardware) we buy through them
• that money + those assets are only transferable to another NFP in the USA -- that means that if we were to have a NFP on our own, e.g. an e.V. in Germany like KDE, we wouldn't be able to transfer the money + assets we had through SPI at that point
• they take 5% of all donations

henne brought up the idea of using the existing http://www.lst.de/

LST is an existing german foundation (e.V.) for the support of free software. Members of LST approached us and offered help

Pro:

• the bureaucracy for e.V. creation is done

Con:

• as it is an existing foundation openSUSE would have at the beginning no say, so we'd rely on the existing members (majority are SUSE employees or ex-SUSE ones.)
• all the donation infrastructure needs to be created anyway

Conclusion

Everything is possible and each solution has its pros and cons

AI: michl to set up a wiki page with all the information to get a better picture AI: michl to get in contact with LST and discuss further

openSUSE conference

- program committee meets in a few days

Membership Advantages

- michl spoke with zonker about a free LWN account for all openSUSE members. A free LWN acount would cost us not less then $ 2 per person and month. Assuming 500 members (currently we have 260 but this will grow) that would mean $ 12k per year. All Board members agreed that this amount of money can be spent better for the community.