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@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.