[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen foundation (again)

[Dan Scott]

There was a brief discussion shortly after the Evergreen Conference
about the possibility of setting up an Evergreen Software Foundation
[1] and most recently a proposal to set up a joint Koha + Evergreen
foundation (which is probably a function better served by something
like http://www.code4lib.org/ in any case).

I posted a response to George's blog post [2] about the difficulties
that the Koha community has undergone recently and their renewed
effort to establish a foundation, but in that context I would like to
revive the discussion about an Evergreen Software Foundation by
suggesting that if such an entity is formed, it should roughly have
the following responsibilities:

* Hold the trademarks, logos, and evergreen-ils.org/open-ils.org
related collateral in trust for the use of the community
* Extend the community's development capacity (for example, by funding
the creation of developer training tutorials and workshops, where
development should be defined broadly to include documentation,
usability, design, testing, etc)
* Coordinate joint funding for the development of new features
* Organize the Evergreen International Conferences

Further, I suggest that we would be foolish to turn down the Software
Freedom Conservancy's [3] offer to serve, for free, as the 501(c)(3)
[4] shell organization that would be able to hold the collateral and
financial assets in trust for the foundation, and would accept
donations to the foundation and maintain corporate records and file
the tax return (again, for free). It has been stated several times
that "it's not that hard to file the paperwork for a 501(c)(3)", but I
would argue that an advantage of the Software Freedom Conservancy is
that it is a neutral entity.

[1]. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.open-ils.general/1258
[2]. http://www.parser.ca/z678/2009/09/16/koha-manoeuvres/
[3]. http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ - "As a fiscal sponsor
for FOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with free
financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself
with technological and artistic decisions."
[4]. As a Canadian, I don't care about 501(c)(3) status because I get
no tax advantages from it.