Hi, On 01/28/2011 01:52 PM, jdd wrote:
* The legal form of the foundation is to be a German voluntary association (wikipedia:Eingetragener_Verein).
I understand very well that this is much more handy than any other system, given where most suse fellows are located
Just for the record. Having a German e.V. is the result of the boards discussions. The argumentation for this is that the majority of contributors to our project is German (European). We have discussed this among ourselves but also have asked people with experience with FOSS foundations (KDE, GNOME, the people on the freedesktop foundations list like Dave Neary or Bradley M. Kuhn) and they also told us that if we want a working foundation for our project that it better be in the country with the most contributors.
but I'm not sure it's the better way to solve problems. among others Linux problems are legal problems (see restricted formats). It was said (I don't know if it's true) that the location of Canonical on the Man island is one of the reason ubuntu is more easy to deal with.
Can you be a bit more specific what you mean by "legal problems"? Are you talking about problems with problematic licensed or patented software like the various implementations of multimedia codecs, binary kernel modules and things like these? If you are talking about this problem then you won't solve it by the location of the foundation. This will always be a matter of risk assessment. Because you will engage in something where the law is way behind reality and the law is constantly tested in court. For a volunteer organization the only outcome of such a risk assessment can be to stay as far away as possible from this. The only real question you have to ask yourself is this: Do you want to be part of an foundation that is in constant legal battle over software patents and licenses? Henne -- Henne Vogelsang, openSUSE. Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-foundation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-foundation+help@opensuse.org