Re: Membership and voting and consensus... (Re: Membership)

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

> > What are "the contributors"? That just re-opens the whole "who gets to
> > be a member" can of worms.
> 
> You solve the whole takeover issue by making the foundation reflect its true
> situation. If it has no power then it is not worth taking over.

Powerwise: As we discussed in San Diego, the only power the Foundation
has --and this is very in line with what Alan is describing-- is to
sprinkle a release with holy water and claim `this is gnome version
x', and that is pretty much the extent of its power.

Organizational wise: the foundation can help establish a place where
companies can debate on the open their strategies without doing this
behind closed door, thus incurring in anti-trust violations.

Encouraging wise: It should be able to encourage people to join the
development of GNOME just as we have done so far, it should encourage
the creation of new teams that can focus on a specific area or problem
in GNOME and address it.

Help wise: various hackers have been helped in the past economically
by either the FSF, the Debian 1k dollars, my personal bank account or
from the beanie award thing we got.

The foundation is responsible for this money, and it should divert
those funds to contributors to the free software movement. 

Miguel.