[board] minutes for May 2009 meeting

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> The minutes for today's meeting, which was small but useful, are   
> attached. More followup should be coming from both Jan and I on  
> things  that were discussed.

I want to explicitly link to the advocacy/organization that we talked  
about during the meeting: http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/

I had them on my radar since they have been funded, and we had a short  
discussion back then whether we want to join them. We decided that we  
didn't really need it at that time yet, and rather want to wait and  
see how this organization evolves. Since then they have acquired (or  
been joined by) a number of well known OSS projects like Mercurial,  
Samba or Wine.

There are two major advantages I see in such a solution:
- we would get tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status which might attract more donations
- we would have a legal entity that makes our copyright situation much safer

The latter could also achieved by using something like  
http://fsfe.org/projects/ftf/fla.en.html. We kept the copyright issues  
a bit vaguely when we decided to assign copyrights to the Horde  
Project, because the project doesn't form a legal entity. This worked  
fine for most people, but not for Intevation and KDAB who contributed  
code to the Kolab stuff in Horde. They are fine with assigning  
copyrights though once a) the copyright holder is a legal entity and  
b) it is made sure that the copyright is kept in an organization that  
keeps the code in the OSS space.

Jan.

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