On 05/07/18 08:49, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On 2018 M07 5, Thu 08:26:33 CEST Simon Lees wrote:
On 05/07/18 01:48, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
On 04.07.2018 09:04, Simon Lees wrote:
On 03/07/18 21:54, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
On 03.07.2018 13:21, Simon Lees wrote:
On 03/07/18 19:55, Henne Vogelsang wrote: > On 03.07.2018 06:33, Simon Lees wrote: >> So yes it makes sense for openSUSE to have its own bank account and >> openSUSE already has the power to do this without needing to ask >> SUSE. > > Interesting, how so?
Well we can create an account but we can't make SUSE put money in it,
Who is this "we" you talk about? You and?
The openSUSE board acting as the people responsible for the projects finances.
Are you seriously suggesting that you want to propose to handle openSUSE donation on a private bank account of yours? I hope not :-)
Nope most certainly not :-)
Do you realize that you are talking in riddles here? Could you please simply tell us how you would create a bank account for openSUSE?
I don't see how that could happen without a new entity which currently does not exist. Unless you simply would continue to use SUSE's back account. Which, I think, is the most pragmatic solution anyway.
Exactly if we were to create a bank account for openSUSE we would need to create a new entity, but the most likely case is we will not create our own bank account but use an umbrella organisation. But I simply cannot tell you what or how we will do something yet because we are still in the process of looking into various options and we as the board have no idea which options we are likely to take and which options we are ruling out for various reasons. Ideally we would have started the discussion on this list in several weeks when we have already looked at most of the options and actually have some idea of what we would like to do. However as the question was raised as part of the SUSE ownership changes so I thought it was worth saying we are in the initial stages of doing something.
My personal initial gut feel on SPI is that if we partnered with them we would almost certainly continue operating the way we have been especially in regards to infrastructure like hardware where we ask for donations of physical hardware or purchase it with through SUSE rather then the SPI and the SPI would just be a fallback / plan B to use in cases where we need to work around cases where SUSE's budget is frozen. Whether other umbrella orgs would give us more freedom i'm still researching. And of course other then the board deciding that this is an issue that we need to look into and solve I haven't discussed any of this with the rest of the board yet they are also reading my opinion for the first time here. But in the next meeting I will hopefully have info on a larger range of orgs then just SPI.
SPI or other umbrella organizations are great for projects which don't have any other organization to handle financial and legal things. They come with some burden, though. They might not be as flexible as desired and they of course take a fee.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to go with the organization supporting openSUSE for its entire existence, i.e. SUSE? SUSE has proven to be a good steward, has reliably put in resources and manpower, and is still giving the community quite a bit of leeway.
There might be a few constraints here and there, but if you look at it compared to the total support in terms of infrastructure, resources, manpower, is it really worth talking about it? Wouldn't our time be much better invested into maintaining the great relationship between SUSE and openSUSE instead of moving away?
Yes we have no intention of moving away from our great relationship with SUSE, at the same time there have been financial restrictions / limitations with our current arrangement that have made it impossible to work with organizations outside of SUSE with our current setup (example below), this and other less major issues have lead the board to believe that we need an alternative solution at times when dealing with sponsors outside of SUSE, If SUSE finds it beneficial to also use this alternative solution at times then they are more then welcome too but we are expecting that atleast most of the time they probably wont. As I mentioned in a previous email last year google offered to sponsor openSUSE in order to to send some people involved in GSoC to an event, at the time SUSE's budgets were frozen and they were unable to accept / use this money on openSUSE's behalf and as a result people missed out on traveling to an event that would have been fully paid for. The board is very keen to ensure that such a situation does not happen again and that we have an alternative way of accepting the sponsorship. Even if this alternative way is only ever used sparingly in cases when SUSE can't accept the money for whatever reason or in cases where I third party doesn't want to donate via SUSE because they have no way of confirming the money they donate will actually be spent on openSUSE. -- 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