[CREATE] [LGF] A name !

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

a.l.e wrote:
> Dave Neary wrote:
>> Smiley indicates humour or irony... but I'll answer this straight :)
> 
> in my case, i tried to express through a smiley the fact that the
> question was meant in a positive, friendly way and not in a provocative
> way.  i guess the one of yours was a more ironic one.

Not intended to be ironic, but friendly (as in, don't take this the
wrong way).

> does anybody care?

No, probably not.

>> Cleared things up? :)
> 
> somehow.
> 
> i still don't know what the SFLC is, but i guess it's a US american
> company which would do a similar work for, us as the gnome foundation is
> currently doing for the LGM.

SFLC = Software Freedom Law Center, a non-profit, funded by donations
from various corporate sponsors, to provide free legal services to free
software projects. Founded by Eben Moglen, they currently have 3 lawyers
working for them (Karen Sandler, Aaron Williamson and another I don't
recall right now) and Bradley Kuhn, formerly of the FSF, who also works
for them but isn't a lawyer. Brandley also donates some of his time on
another SFLC project, the Software Freedome Conservancy, which provides
fiscal agency, financial and administrative services to (you guessed it)
free software projects. Including, as Jon said, Inkscape.

> what i'm still missing are the advantages against just creating a very
> simple association and using an external organization (like the gnome
> foundation) to manage our funds.

"Create a simple association" implies a certain number of things in my
mind: By-laws & statutes, a membership structure, a governing
jurisdiction, a board of directors, tax returns, elections... basically,
a formal structure, registered with some government somewhere, governed
by the rules of that government (and if you want to give tax deductible
relief to sponsors, or you want to not pay taxes on donations yourself,
you have a lot of paperwork to do to justify your organisation).

By putting yourself under an existing umbrella organisation, you avoid
that - informal elections or nominations of the people who will deal
with the umbrella folks would be useful, but you don't need to have
legally water-tight statutes & by-laws, AGMs, treasurer reports
submitted to the IRS every year, etc. You're getting all the benefits
and none of the down-side.

Plus, in general, the only reason to create an association for a free
software project is a bank account, some kind of co-ordinated
marketing/branding campaign, and elected representatives. You don't need
an association to do the 2nd & 3rd.

> or would the SFLC be the full politically correct partner boudwijn was
> suggesting we shold look for?

The Software Freedom Conservancy probably would be (the SFLC is slightly
different, but very much related).

> p.s.: after trying several times to understand what "To-may-to
> to-mah-to?" actually means, i finally got it. now: can we keep a 
> language level which is a bit more friendly to non native speakers? (if
> requested, i may even personally switch to sentences with correct caps).

The song about pronunciations of tomato and potato is very well known
internationally, and I didn't think that using the phonetics of it might
cause problems. I am sorry.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary at free.fr
Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45
Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13