Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Robert Humphreys <rob@collab.net> writes:

> Corporate members with more than ten full time employees will pay
> $20,000 a year for membership dues, and companies with less than ten
> full time employees will pay $10,000 a year for membership dues. Special
> considerations for non profit organizations, early stage start ups, etc.
> can be made and are subject to approval by the Board of Directors.

I've been told there been some discussion of the membership dues
in private email, but so far I've not seen any public discussion,
so I wanted to bring it up here.

I have several concerns here:

- Who decides (decided???) the fees? This would either be
  part of the bylaws, or decided by the elected board of 
  directors.

  I don't think hard-coding it into the bylaws is a good
  idea, and the board of directors has not been elected 
  yet...

- $10,000 or $20,000 doesn't seem to jibe with making the 
  advisory board "open". These aren't huge amounts of 
  money, but I think it is certainly large enough to act
  as a discouraging factor to some companies.

- Do we need a foundation with this much funding? One thing
  I think we're all agreed on is that we don't want this
  to become the OSF ... we won't be doing development, we
  don't need a management structure, etc. 

  I think, in general, accountability, responsiveness, and 
  "community spirit" are going to be a lot higher if member 
  companies donate marketing, infrastructure, etc, resources
  rather than donating money and trying to build those
  up at the foundation.

  (Clearly, the proposed membership dues are not big enough 
  to become a new OSF - but I think they are possibly big
  enough to get in the way of lean, mean, thin, flexible 
  foundation.)
 
Regards,
                                        Owen