Re: Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi Rusty,

I don't think it'll be a problem in practice.  I think there'll be 7 to 10 companies
on the advisory board the first year, and maybe 1 or 2 will be in a special case like
that that can be easily managed by the board.

The more interesting question, in my opinion, is whether we want the foundation to
have a staff person and a budget.  Havoc and Dave articulated some good reasons not to

have a budget or a staff.   Rob, at Collab.net, and I have been spending a lot of time

helping to get this things off the ground, so I'm wondering how all of that work will
get done once we move on to different things.   I think things like relations with
media affairs, corporate partners, marketing Gnome, organizing conferences etc. do
become more and more important over time.  We have 40 or 50 full-time paid Gnome
hackers now, and I think it'd be good to have at least 1 paid Gnome-non-developer.
The question is whether that person should be on staff with the foundation or on the
payroll of one of the companies (right now, I'm doing this work on Eazel's dime).  I'm

not 100% convinced either way.

Bart

Rusty Conover wrote:

> On Wed, 02 Aug 2000 16:59:12 Bart Decrem wrote:
> > David,
> >
> > I think this is an important issue that merits further discussion.  My take
> on
> > it is that, looking at prospective members that I can think of, everybody's
> > able to afford the membership fee, and there's a real likelihood that we'll
> > want to have a coordination person.  If we don't need a staff person, then
> we
> > have a 'war chest' that we can use to organize conferences, buy computers
> for
> > hackers etc.  And it breaks my heart to think of some of the huge companies
> who
> > may come on board, and to think that we might *not* ask them for $20,000 to
> > donate to the cause.  So the current dues structure gives us that option,
> and
> > options are good in life.
> >
> > If a start-up came along tomorrow that cannot afford the fee, then the board
> > can (and, I'm sure, will) waive the fee.
>
> Bart,
>
> What happens if the company has an interest in working with GNOME but isn't
> quite a startup, yet the majority of their business is not gnome related.  Having
> to go before the board to justify all the differences in membership could grow
> very consuming of the board's time.  There should be better alternatives then
> "just go before the board" for each special case.  Obviously I'm not trying to just
> play "what if" but to ask for special permission every case seems quite
> redundant.
>
> Rusty
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