SPI invited X.Org to join as Associated Project

[Daniel Stone]

On Monday, January 12, 2015, Luc Verhaegen <libv at skynet.be> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 09:43:17AM +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> >
> > We'll get a summary sent out asap, in the meantime a few incomplete
> answers
> > from the back of the head:
> > - timeline: we have 90 days to accept the invitation, rest TBA
> > - asset list still needs to be compiled, assets will be transferred to
> SPI.
> >   we have 3 years after joining to do this. assets include domain names,
> a
> >   bit of hardware (that's mostly outdated/unused) and other IP dating
> back
> >   to the X Consortium that we're chasing up
>
> Really? Wow. That smells an awful lot like the open group. Maybe Egbert
> can enlighten us all on what it took after the xfree86 fork to get x.org
> out of the claws of that defunct organization.
>
> I am amazed though. It took the best part of a decade to finally become
> 501c3. It then took the best part of a quarter iirc to lose that status
> again, to have it reinstated afterwards with the help of SFLC. And then
> what seems like a clone of the open group is quickly ran off to.
>

TOG was a purely commercial group without any open source foundations. SPI
grew out of Debian, who are many things but not commercial.

SPI already manages assets and trademarks on behalf of Debian, Arch,
LibreOffice, Postgres, FFmpeg, Haskell, OpenEmbedded, Jenkins, and more;
you can see this in one click from their site, as well as their
bylaws. Every single one of these projects is larger than X.Org, and none
of them have seemed to have a problem with it in the past 17 years. Their
board is constituted of very long-standing community members who are deeply
passionate about independent, community-run, projects.

Multiple members of the current board worked through the TOG fiasco, and I
caught some of it in my time. And I think it's totally irrelevant. As,
seemingly, do all SPI's member projects, and the SFLC, who advise SPI and
have (AIUI) been advising the board through this whole process.

It's kind of disappointing that people don't seem to read the board meeting
minutes (which have been issued for as long as I can remember), or the
board update talk linked above, which have all repeatedly mentioned this.

Cheers,
Daniel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://foundation.x.org/archives/members/attachments/20150112/dca59a34/attachment.htm>