Re: [gentoo-nfp] Questions For Gentoo Foundation Trustee Candidates

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 3:59 PM Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>
> This problem will not go away if we join an umbrella.
>
> Gentoo will still have to manage its own assets, defend its own
> trademarks and so on.
>

Certainly those assets will still exist, but they would be owned and
managed by the umbrella legally.  If the distro wanted to tell
somebody to stop using our trademark we would somehow have to bring it
to the attention of the umbrella and ask them to do it, since legally
it would be THEIR trademark, not "ours" (since legally there is no
"ours/us").

I think the question you asked is still useful in the way that you
asked it, as it doesn't hurt to discuss how we might see the distro
interacting with the umbrella.  Presumably somebody will be in the
position of interacting with the umbrella to tell them what to do on
our behalf, so we can talk about how we might see that working.

I'm not sure if anybody has already talked to the various umbrellas
about how this typically works, but I'm not sure you could really have
any kind of contract with them.  A contract requires two parties, and
even if the Foundation signs off as one of them if it dissolves it no
longer even exists to bring up a dispute.  I imagine they probably
would probably document a "donation" of all the Foundation's assets to
the umbrella, and then anything going forward from there would just
operate under the umbrella's own bylaws and documented procedures.
The relationship between all of us and the umbrella legally would be
the same as the relationship between any random Gentoo team like the
amd64 arch team and the existing Foundation.  That is, between a
non-legal-entity composed of random individuals with varying legal
relationships with the Foundation (they may or may not be members),
and a legal corporation that ultimately gets its own say as to whether
they go along with it.

I don't think legally you can really force any of these umbrellas to
do anything except to the degree that we get to put people on their
board or voting membership.  You have to do your due diligence
beforehand and then trust them to continue operating the way you want
them to.  It is no different when you sign code over to the FSF or
license it GPL v3+ - you have no guarantee that GPL v4 won't give
EvilCorp the right to do whatever they want with your code/etc, but
you have to just trust that the FSF is unlikely to ever do this.
(Arguably the FSFe FLA approach works better in that regard, and I
completely advocate it being used within Gentoo, but that is a
separate topic and IMO can be implemented whether the Foundation
remains or we use an umbrella.)

That said, for any random Gentoo Foundation member the situation isn't
all that different.  None of us has any more power legally over what
the Foundation does with our code/donations/whatever than the one vote
we get to cast annually for the Trustees, and some hypothetical powers
to override them that are unlikely to ever actually be used.  To the
extent that we get to become members of the umbrella we would have the
same limited influence there.

This is already a long-ish post, but maybe I should point out that
there are other options available to us.  For example, the Gentoo
Foundation could turn over all its MONEY to the umbrella org, but not
its copyrights or trademarks.  It would still have to file taxes, but
if we have no financial transactions except maybe a trademark renewal
every ten years then that burden will be greatly reduced.  Then if we
had to do some kind of legal action we could ask the umbrella to be
our representatives assuming they were willing.  That is just a
thought, and the candidates can consider that as they outline their
own ideas...

-- 
Rich