Hi all, This thread is socially and politically very interesting. Le mardi 25 juin 2019 à 20:14 -0400, Patrick Shanahan a écrit :
* Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> [06-25-19 19:58]:
On 26/06/2019 04:09, Sébastien 'sogal' Poher wrote:
Le mardi 25 juin 2019 à 04:28:24, Per Jessen a écrit :
Robert Schweikert wrote:
On a personal note, I am not much of a fan of the very common "pay for play" scheme and I'd rather see the Foundation board elected with no appointed members by anyone.
+1. I would also much prefer to have an elected Board of Directors.
For a lot of political and ethical reasons, I second this view. The Board, including its Chairman should, ideally, be elected by its community, I think we almots all agree of that ideal. But the reality, that no one here can deny, is that SUSE has indeed a "special" relationship with openSUSE. And the other way round as well. We might have others sponsors and I hope we will get more. But I seriously doubt that we will ever get one with a similar link as we have with SUSE.
So having, amongst the Board, an "ambassador" from SUSE is not "pay to play" (to "play" what exactly btw?), it is just realistic and if we remove it I think it will make certain things difficult. Should the "ambassador" be the Chairman of the Board is another question. I do not think this is necessary and would rather like the Chairman be elected by the other Board members.
"Pay to play" is an English expression, I believe its origin is in sporting where a certain player might make it onto a team not because they are the best most suitable player for the team, but because having them on the team ensures the club gets a significant amount more sponsorship, its fairly common in motorsport.
Thank you for the explanation and precision on this expression Simon, but I am not sure how it applies here. SUSE is defacto in the game with us already.
Onto the more important parts, as I said somewhere else the "chairperson" is really just a title, Richard doesn't always chair / direct meetings often we take it in turns depending on the topic of discussion and who knows more. Having said that alot of the time Richard does chair, but partly thats because everyone else is too lazy.
but there is a *title* and with it comes ... even if only perception, it must not provide an inkling that any entity can provide influence that they would not otherwise have.
I do not see the title in itself a problem. A Chair person, even if he/she doesn't always chair meetings, can be the spokesperson of the project/foundation inside and outside of it, representing the project/foundation interests. But if he/she represents both the openSUSE project/foundation interests *and* SUSE's interests, it is a problem. SUSE should have the right to appoint its representative amongst board members (especially if we keep the SUSE part in openSUSE project/foundation name, I wouldn't want that someone uses my name without having a look at what it does with it!) and its counter power, if I may say, should be a community elected Chairpersonn. Have a nice day, -- 'When there is no more room at school, the dumb will walk the Earth.' Sébastien 'sogal' Poher -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org