Re: Corporate Stuff

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 10:44:56PM +0300, Ali Abdin wrote:
> Nat's idea was no ONE company have over 50% membership on the board. But lets
> look at the issue. That way GNOME can never be controlled or dominated by any
> 'combination' of companies (lets say Eazel + Helix have some sort of corporate
> alliance and managed to always get 51% of the vote).

I think we can always place stricter limits on the board to make company
controll even harder.  For example:

The board can have at most 2 people from a single company.
The board MUST have at least 2 people not hired by a company involved with
GNOME.

For a board of members then, you would have to get at least 3 companies
together to form a majority.

Plus I think the issue is not that great, as if companies do "take over" the
board, the maintainers can just stop listening.  Currently however it's fair
game for companies to take over maintainers or assume maintainerships of
project and have absolute control over them, and it seems to work ok.  I
think the GPL protects our rights just enough to make it basically impossible
to truly "take away" gnome from us,  so I think this should not be such a
huge worry.

George

-- 
George <jirka@5z.com>
   There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that
   which should not be done at all.
                       -- Peter Drucker