On 10/3/19 1:20 AM, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,.
On 02.10.19 15:49, Richard Brown wrote:
On Wed, 2019-10-02 at 13:44 +0200, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
So if you put the vote forward like that, people will have a vote on something they can imagine very well (a.k.a. status quo) versus some *undefined* future.
If the Project votes for not changing the name, I expect the following consequences
- The Board...
Yes, sure, this means the vote has potentially unbalanced outcomes - one option is immediately actionable with a goal that is immediately realisable and one is an option which is more uncertain.
To be as blunt as you taught me to be, such is life.
But that doesn't mean the board *should* just put life out for a vote to a group of people and expect them to do the right thing. Not if we expect something good coming out of this!
If something is as unclear as everything is right now the board can not rely on people to decide the right thing. It's the boards job to eat the bullet and make things clear and more balanced, sorry.
Regardless, either option compells the Project to months or years of work, and before any such large burden is undertaken, it should be well justified.
Then the board should step back and think about what it wants us to vote on. It's clearly not renaming the project!
If all of this is because of the foundation, and if you want to make sure that putting in work is justified, I would suggest something like:
In the ideal world our project would not be dependent on SUSE and run it's own legal entity to represent ourselves and what we do. A legal entity is mostly required for handling (receiving/giving) money, goods and services. For instance: $LIST_OF_EXAMPLES_WHAT_THE_LEGAL_ENTITY_DOES
In reality we don't have a legal entity and depend on SUSE to handle anything that requires one.
The consequences of *not* forming a foundation are: $COMPREHENSIVE_LIST_OF_DRAWBACKS_THE_CURRENT_SETUP_HAS
Forming the foundation will require: $COMPREHENSIVE_LIST_OF_THINGS_TO_DO (including decision if/else branches like the naming one, different foundation setups etc.)
Do you want the openSUSE Project to attempt to create a foundation:
- [ ] Yes - [ ] No - [ ] Abstain
Because this is the real question before us and it's your job¹ to hash this out and to make this clear if you want your members to vote on this.
From the consoltation the board did around osc19 and on the mailing list after we found that the general idea of creating a foundation is almost universally supported both within openSUSE's membership and SUSE's leadership. As such the board decided that a vote as you propose is unneccesary at this stage and that instead the board would proceed to create a detailed proposal of what the foundation would look like and how it will function and when everything is sorted out we will put a vote to the membership along the lines of would you like to replace the current openSUSE Board with an openSUSE Foundation as outlined in the following documents - [ ] Yes - [ ] No - [ ] Abstain The push for changing the name is not directly tied to the creation of a foundation. The group of members who feel that the project should rebrand to a different name would still feel that way even if we weren't looking at a foundation. It is obvious from the mailing list thread that was started that unlike creating a foundation there is no consensus around changing the name and that the percentage of membership asking for a change is not insignficant and therefore it would be unfair to those members if we didn't have a vote. The board after all is elected to represent the members. It would also be foolish of the board to go ahead and create an "openSUSE Foundation" now if a majority of members believe the project should be called something else because if that is the case dropping the openSUSE name will just come up again in a few years and at that point changing the foundation name will be near impossible. This is just another reason why the board feels its wisest to deal with this issue now before we get into the details of creating a foundation rather then sweeping it back under the rug for another few years because its hard controversial and incovinent. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org