Re: progress on OE organization issues

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 21:43 -0400, Cliff Brake wrote:
> The eV stuff is a little less known, as about all I can do keep
> hassling those who started the process.  I did note your thoughts
> about the eV, and have asked the http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ for
> any advice they might have.  An organized way to handle funding does
> not seen super critical at this time with the nslu2-linux server
> offer, but something we should get in place.

Yes, agreed.  Having a legal entity in place to handle funds would not
be at the top of my own list of organisational priorities for OE; as far
as I can tell, the amount of money that's actually flowing through the
project at the moment seems to be fairly negligible.  I think there are
other issues which would have more of an impact on the day-to-day
operations of the project.  My own personal "most wanted" thing would be
the establishment of some kind of technical steering committee to
provide a coherent policy direction, rather than having decisions with
global impact made on the hoof by individual developers.

The other thing that does strike me about the eV, though, is that it
does seem to be a rather cumbersome choice vehicle for solving the
problem at hand.  From what I gather, the administrative requirements
for setting up a legal entity in Germany do seem to be significantly
more complicated and generally onerous than almost anywhere else I can
think of; witness I guess the fact that it's taken something over a year
to get to the point that we have with it.  

Just as a point of comparison, a couple of weeks ago I found myself
needing to set up a new limited company here in the UK.  It took me
about half an hour to fill in the form, cost me the equivalent of about
$40 in filing fees, and the company was all ready to go by the end of
the same day.  (This is very roughly the equivalent of a German GmbH
rather than an eV, but still.)  I've never been personally involved in
incorporating a company in the US but, from what I gather, it's more or
less equally straightforward to do so there.

I should say again though that I don't intend any of these remarks to be
a criticism of those who are setting up the eV, for whose efforts I have
great respect, nor am I in any way opposed to the eV itself.  I do
wonder though whether all this administrative work is a good use of
scarce OE developer manpower.

> I have been pondering doing a series of polls to get feedback from the
> OE community and users.  The first one should be coming out shortly.
> Perhaps we can use a mechanism like this for voting, etc eventually.

Yes, the one about hosting seems to have worked pretty well so far.
Thanks again for your work on that.

p.