Governance of Wine with respect to the Software Freedom Conservancy (update October 2011)
Hi Folks, I try to send out a periodic message to the wine-devel mailing list outlining the 'corporate' structure of Wine and how some decisions are made. We work with the Software Freedom Conservancy. They manage the pieces of Wine that benefit from a formal organization, such as managing money, holding Trademarks, and so on. The primary activity we have conducted with them over the past several years is managing money - about $3,000 each year. They manage all funds donated to Wine - the donate button goes into a bank account they manage and any larger private donations go there as well. For decisions on how to spend funds, we've adopted a loose set of guidelines. That is, we have a decision group and we require a majority of members to approve any spending. Alexandre and I are the current members of that group. We also claim the right to appoint anyone else to replace or augment the decision group. We CC all decisions to an auditor. We have recently asked Michael Stefanuic to replace Zachary Goldberg in that role. A critical requirement, we feel, is that a non CodeWeavers staff member be fully aware of all decisions made. We choose this strategy rather than a fully public process so that we can apply discretion and protect privacy of people that ask for help with travel funding. The SFC will recognize a 'revolt' by the Wine project. That is, the designated decision group can be overthrown, once you figure out our evil plans, if the SFC is persuaded that the majority of Wine contributors agree on that point. Patch count in the Wine tree will be the primary mechanism to recognize a contributor. Finally, all spending by the SFC on Wine's behalf for the last few years has been related to Wineconf. That has primarily been to help defray travel costs for Wine contributors to come to Wineconf. Wine's income has been around $3,000 / year for the past few years; we tend to spend down much of the balance each year for Wineconf. Cheers, Jeremy p.s. One note - the SFC also manages the GSOC payments, although I believe that they ostensibly manage that on behalf of Google, not really Wine. That is generally coordinated by Wine's GSOC coordinator, and Alexandre and I have nothing to do with it.
Not that I have any problems with our benevolent overlords, and not that I would likely achieve franchise with a scant 2 patches under my belt, but I can't help wondering how such a revolt would succeed seeing as the only method to achieve franchise-hood is controlled by the same people one would be revolting against. On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Jeremy White <jwhite(a)codeweavers.com> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I try to send out a periodic message to the wine-devel mailing list outlining the 'corporate' structure of Wine and how some decisions are made.
We work with the Software Freedom Conservancy. They manage the pieces of Wine that benefit from a formal organization, such as managing money, holding Trademarks, and so on.
The primary activity we have conducted with them over the past several years is managing money - about $3,000 each year. They manage all funds donated to Wine - the donate button goes into a bank account they manage and any larger private donations go there as well.
For decisions on how to spend funds, we've adopted a loose set of guidelines. That is, we have a decision group and we require a majority of members to approve any spending. Alexandre and I are the current members of that group. We also claim the right to appoint anyone else to replace or augment the decision group.
We CC all decisions to an auditor. We have recently asked Michael Stefanuic to replace Zachary Goldberg in that role. A critical requirement, we feel, is that a non CodeWeavers staff member be fully aware of all decisions made.
We choose this strategy rather than a fully public process so that we can apply discretion and protect privacy of people that ask for help with travel funding.
The SFC will recognize a 'revolt' by the Wine project. That is, the designated decision group can be overthrown, once you figure out our evil plans, if the SFC is persuaded that the majority of Wine contributors agree on that point. Patch count in the Wine tree will be the primary mechanism to recognize a contributor.
Finally, all spending by the SFC on Wine's behalf for the last few years has been related to Wineconf. That has primarily been to help defray travel costs for Wine contributors to come to Wineconf.
Wine's income has been around $3,000 / year for the past few years; we tend to spend down much of the balance each year for Wineconf.
Cheers,
Jeremy
p.s. One note - the SFC also manages the GSOC payments, although I believe that they ostensibly manage that on behalf of Google, not really Wine. That is generally coordinated by Wine's GSOC coordinator, and Alexandre and I have nothing to do with it.
Hi Michael,
Not that I have any problems with our benevolent overlords, and not that I would likely achieve franchise with a scant 2 patches under my belt, but I can't help wondering how such a revolt would succeed seeing as the only method to achieve franchise-hood is controlled by the same people one would be revolting against.
You are new around here, we bottom-post ;) Not true, of course. Alexandre is at the top of the list of contributors, naturally, but he doesn't constitute a controlling majority. (I'm discounting Jeremy's contributions, which is correct within tolerable error <snarky grin>.) --Juan
On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Juan Lang <juan.lang(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Michael,
Not that I have any problems with our benevolent overlords, and not that I would likely achieve franchise with a scant 2 patches under my belt, but I can't help wondering how such a revolt would succeed seeing as the only method to achieve franchise-hood is controlled by the same people one would be revolting against.
You are new around here, we bottom-post ;)
Not true, of course. Alexandre is at the top of the list of contributors, naturally, but he doesn't constitute a controlling majority. (I'm discounting Jeremy's contributions, which is correct within tolerable error <snarky grin>.) --Juan
My bad, gmail makes it easy to make that mistake. ;) As I said, our overlords are kind and benevolent and I'm sure that the mention of "evil plans" was simply a joke as such wise and noble developers could need harbor a malevolent thought. But, unless I've been misreading this mailing list, all patches have to go through our current enlightened leader before becoming part of the patch count in the wine tree. Not that the powers that be are susceptible to temptation, but lesser mortals might find that being more selective about whose patches are accepted during periods of discontent as an easy way to influence such a vote. Likewise, even if such a mortal didn't give into temptation, if the usurpers lose the vote they could always claim such impropriety did take place. I only bring it up because tempers tend to run pretty hot over topics like ousting a project's leadership in open revolt and the last thing you want is the losing side posting ream after ream of git commit logs trying to show to that several of their supporters should have received franchise, but their patches were blocked to prevent it. Rules like that should be designed to end a conflict with creating new sources of it. .
As I said, our overlords are kind and benevolent and I'm sure that the mention of "evil plans" was simply a joke as such wise and noble developers could need harbor a malevolent thought. But, unless I've been misreading this mailing list, all patches have to go through our current enlightened leader before becoming part of the patch count in the wine tree. Not that the powers that be are susceptible to temptation, but lesser mortals might find that being more selective about whose patches are accepted during periods of discontent as an easy way to influence such a vote. Likewise, even if such a mortal didn't give into temptation, if the usurpers lose the vote they could always claim such impropriety did take place.
My point is that the math isn't in your argument's favor. It would take a long period of rejection by the current overlords before being able to squelch any hypothetical usurpers, given that a) the current overlords' contributions consist of Alexandre's, and b) he does not constitute a controlling majority of contributions, nor anywhere close to it. --Juan
participants (3)
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Jeremy White -
Juan Lang -
Michael Curran