Re: Corporate Stuff

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

George <jirka@5z.com> writes:

> 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.

I don't know whether this'll work, but is there any way we can "protect"
employed people from this (that their employer tells them what to say) ?

For instance, there are several possibilities for this:

* We can require all companies who employ people who're on the board to
  sign some kind of disclaimer that they won't force their employes to
  speak for the company.

  The "good" companies will most likely do this so we'll just keep the
  bad ones out.

* We may require all board members who're employed by a company to
  give a promise that they'll only say their personal oppinion and not
  the company's and that they'll resign from their board seat if their
  company tries to force them otherwise.

  In this case, they can at least tell their boss that they promised to
  only represent their personal oppinion and not their company's.

  Either their boss will listen or otherwise it should be easier to
  kick them from the board.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)