Hi folks,
As you may recall, several years ago, we decided to work with the Software Freedom Conservancy to ask them to manage aspects of Wine that merited the shield of a formal organization.
They have been great, and a great improvement over our former process.
I thought I'd send an email out for the record, expressing what they do for us, and how that is governed.
First, there are essentially 2 major assets they manage for us. They manage all funds donated to Wine - the donate button goes into a bank account they manage. They also hold trademarks to the Wine logo that they filed on our behalf.
For decisions on how to spend funds, we've adopted a loose set of guidelines. That is, Dan Kegel, Alexandre, and myself are in contact with them. The goal is that all 3 of us agree on every decision, but 2 of the 3 of us must concur with any decision before it is effective. We three can appoint anyone else we choose to replace or augment the decision group.
All decisions are CC'd to the WWN author (currently Zach Goldberg) for monitoring.
The SFC will recognize a 'revolt' by the Wine project. That is, Dan, Alexandre and I 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 either been to pay for conference expenses directly (as in Reading, 2 years ago), or to help defray travel costs for Wine contributors to come to Wineconf (as happened this year).
Cheers,
Jeremy