Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Mar 9

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

     Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Mar 9
     =======================================


Attendance:
===========

   Owen Taylor (chairing)
   Daniel Veillard
   Jonathan Blandford
   Dave Neary
   Murray Cumming
   Federico Mena-Quintero
   Tim Ney
   Christian Schaller
   Jody Goldberg

Regrets:
========
   Luis Villa
   Miguel de Icaza

Actions Completed:
==================

   ACTION: Luis make sure the roadmap is converted to Wiki with help of Jeff
      => Done

   ACTION: Federico: check website for 2.10
      => Done
   
   ACTION: Owen to fix the WHOIS record for gnome.org to point to live
      => ongoing, in progress
         completed shortly after the call.

   ACTION: Jonathan check the machine donation value from Red Hat
      => mostly done, we don't have the value yet
         completed shortly after the call.

Actions:
========

   ACTION: Tim and Dave check the travel subsities for the GUADEC speakers
      => Dave got the list, Tim mailed, most replies received,
         ongoing

New Action:
===========
 
   ACTION: Tim to forward the trademark agreements from the lawyers to the
           foundation list (after posting them on the Wiki)

   ACTION: Dave to start looking for vendors to host the GNOME online shop

Discussion
==========

   - Status of trademark agreement drafts
     Tim got two drafts from the laywers, they need to be forwarded
     for wider review.
     It makes sense to have a public review at this point, the board will
     collect feedback made on the list for two weeks, and then resolvable
     issues will be sent back to the lawyers to get a final version.

   - EU Patents
     The foundation 501c3 tax exempt status restrict us in term of political
     actions. We can certainly educate about the issue, but dedicating time
     or money from the foundation to influence the law may need to be checked.
     Getting the FreePatent logo on www.gnome.org and pointing to 
     http://swpat.ffii.org/ sounds the right first step at this point.

   - Tim to ask the lawyers about possible need for a disclaimer somewhere
     on planet.gnome.org.

   - Merchandizing
     Some agreement we need a shop to sell GNOME items.
     The question is how to minimize the work needed there is multiple ways,
     the best one seems to delegate to a single supplier at this point,
     granting a non-exclusive agreement.
     The next question is the product line: books are good sellers, for example
     a handbook like Mozilla did, it's unclear we can invest money on this.
     We clearly should have  t-shirt, sweatshirt to bootstrap the store.
     Initial target: get a shop by 2.12 release.

   - Next conf call in two weeks

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/