On 7/8/24 6:25 PM, Attila Pinter wrote:
On Monday, July 8th, 2024 at 12:49 PM, Patrick Fitzgerald <patrickf@i-layer.com> wrote:
Thank you, Patrick for your answers, appreciate it!
Actually, I don't recall that it actually being a decision that was formally made. Perhaps it should be, however, but practically speaking, I'm not sure if it would carry any weight - because without the foundation there would be no sponsorship, because there is literally nowhere for the money to go to. That would have led to $0.00 being collected these past 16 months.
I would much prefer to have an official stand on the foundation from the Board, either acknowledging or dismissing it as the official foundation to support the project. As someone who was also on the Board, and been around the project for a while I welcome the idea of the foundation along with the rebranding of the project. This two likely go hand-in-hand. Likewise, I don't believe that the trustees should do all this work for free.
As an unofficial statement from a board member who has made a small donation to the foundation i'd say the following. At the moment I see it as a separate entity that is helping the project fill a range of needs on a case by case basis that the project can't fill otherwise. In its current state of governance I don't believe it is ready to become the official foundation and fully integrated into the project. But I also see it as a slowly evolving work in progress and as things progress and processes change maybe it will become such. At the same time for the project as a whole not to end up with a renaming situation again in 10 to 15 years I believe that it is important that at best the project rather then SUSE holds the trademarks to the name and at worst SUSE holds the trademark but with a transfer of ownership clause that means should SUSE stop investing into openSUSE then the trademarks should be held by a separate body. To make such an agreement work there needs to be some form of foundation setup to handle the trademarks. Which in my opinion could be Geekos if we can get the governance right at the same time if the community chooses a completely different name or we can't get the governance structure of the geekos to a point where its accountable to the community then it likely makes sense to create something else. In the meantime the current foundation has been a useful tool in filling a range of gaps and directing greater sponsorship into the community and for that I'm thankful and I think it makes sense for it to continue to exist in that role until these discussions around name governance and structure are settled. At that point we can decide if it makes sense to transfer to something else or adopt it as official. -- 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