gmane.org.spi.general

Licence choice of version proxy, licence stewardship

Ian Jackson — 2008-11-27T13:47:12

Several of the recent FSF licences have a `licence proxy' feature, where the copyrightholders can name a proxy who will decide whether new versions of the relevant licence apply. And it sometimes arises that projects want to change licence and this can be very difficult otherwise. So I think the licence proxy feature is useful and I think it can usefully be simulated and generalised. I think one thing that SPI could usefully do would be to act as a `choice of licence proxy'. I think this kind of arrangement might make a better alternative to copyright assignment to SPI. I was thinking something along these lines: DRAFT COPYRIGHT NOTICE Gnomovision - a program to reveal invisible gnomes Copyright (C) 2007 Ian Jackson This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 3 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. You may also redistribute and/or modify this program under any licence which is

Re: Request for EDU contacts

Louis Suarez-Potts — 2008-11-24T22:42:08

On 2008-11-24, at 17:16 , Joshua D. Drake wrote: Then join the group and post queries. I'm also working with Seneca College, in Toronto. It's had success with Mozilla Firefox and other projects/apps. -louis

Re: Request for EDU contacts

Joshua D. Drake — 2008-11-24T22:16:40

My focus right now is Higher Ed, so Universities and Community Colleges. The reason is, they are the kids that will be affected the quickest and have the most opportunity to influence decisions in the next 5 years. Joshua D. Drake

Re: Request for EDU contacts

Louis Suarez-Potts — 2008-11-24T22:10:31

Josh, Let's work together on this, as I've also been working in this space and so have others, including Mark Surman of Mozilla Foundation. We can discuss this offlist, and on the Google Group I set up a while ago, though it is more focused on universities than general education, and I tend to think now the scope must be broadened. See: http://groups.google.ca/group/foss-universities It used to have an embarrassing amount of spam. I spent some quality time deleting it. Louis On 2008-11-24, at 16:10 , Joshua D. Drake wrote: -- Louis Suarez-Potts, PhD Community Manager, Sun Microsystems, Inc. OpenOffice.org

Request for EDU contacts

Joshua D. Drake — 2008-11-24T21:10:01

Hello, As part of my current FOSS mission, I am reaching out to United States based educational instituions and offering to talk to ACM, CS, IEEE students. What I have found however, is that a lot of these folks are either very busy or contact web pages are out of sync with reality. So I thought I would appeal to peeps on this list. If you have a contact at a University, I would appreciate an introduction. If you would like to see some of the talks I have done you can view them here: http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/11/you_are_not_good_enough_for_open_source/ http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/11/the_open_source_job_market/ http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/10/on_the_morning_of_west_east_08_appears/ And any of you who have attended PgConference: West/East have seen me speak. Sincerely, Joshua D. Drake

Meeting log for 2008-11-19

MJ Ray — 2008-11-20T19:45:06

A fairly brief and workmanlike routine meeting. A few things brewing, but I didn't notice anything major. Meeting minutes, www volunteering and getting reliable reminders out seem to need more work. Again, all three officers reported (yay!), but again, linuxpoet raised an unannounced item at the meeting (boo!). "It is good practice to set a deadline for submission of new business, and to list the business to be conducted in meeting announcements." -- SPI, 2007. HIGHLIGHTS 20:02:29 [item 1, Opening] Welcome to today's Software in the Public Interest board of directors meeting, which is now called to order. Today's agenda and details of pending resolutions can be found on the web at: http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2008/2008-11-19.html 20:02:29 [item 2, Roll Call] I received a private message on IRC from Neil that he might be in transit at this time. Jimmy Kaplowitz Bdale Garbee * zobel Martin Zobel-Helas Joshua Drake Luk Claes

Meeting log for 2008-10-15

MJ Ray — 2008-10-16T15:01:35

This SPI board meeting was the first I remember where all three officers submitted reports (yay!) and the meeting took only 27mins, even including an open Q+A call. So if you'd like to spend the time saved reading http://www.jasonkitcat.com/ you've got a link now ;-) and some members posted about how SPI is fairly safe from the banking crisis in http://www.news.software.coop/software-in-the-public-interest-october-2008/233/ HIGHLIGHTS [item 1, Opening] Welcome to today's Software in the Public Interest board of directors meeting, which is now called to order. Today's agenda and details of pending resolutions can be found on the web at: http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/agenda/2008/2008-10-15.html [item 2, Roll Call] Michael Schultheiss Bdale Garbee David Graham Martin Zobel-Helas Jimmy Kaplowitz Luk Claes Joshua Drake [from item 4] [item 3, President's Report] I provided a brief report on activity relating to the Open Voting Foru

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Tim Brown — 2008-10-13T17:49:30

Thanks Michael!

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Michael Schultheiss — 2008-10-13T17:41:13

_______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list Spi-general< at >lists.spi-inc.org http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general

Re: Expert service, was: OpenVas plugin development

Bdale Garbee — 2008-10-06T13:44:42

No, I don't believe we've ever done anything like trying to keep stats on the performance of our pro-bono legal advisors. However, we have reacted when we realized things weren't going well at various times in the past, including changing our accounting firm, adding the SFLC folks to our pool of resources, etc. It certainly makes sense that as we continue to grow and provide assistance for more projects, that we need to continue to evolve our practices and review our "vendor" relationships periodically. The step Michael has already described of moving to pay for more bookkeeping services is likely to be our next such change. Bdale

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Wichert Akkerman — 2008-10-06T09:48:42

That was last Thursday. Did we get or set a new deadline? Wichert.

Expert service, was: OpenVas plugin development

MJ Ray — 2008-10-06T08:59:25

It looks like quite a few of the board's requests get delayed waiting for the experts to reply. Maybe it just looks like that, though: are the board monitoring how often it happens, so SPI knows when to praise them for excellent service in the annual report, or when to try finding more||different experts? Thanks,

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Michael Schultheiss — 2008-10-03T13:22:49

I haven't yet heard back from the CPA. Our attorney also said he would research the issues and get back to me this week. I'll ask them for a status update.

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Tim Brown — 2008-10-03T13:01:04

Michael, Any update on this? Cheers, Tim

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Tim Brown — 2008-09-28T11:43:07

*nod*. Well, since one of the prize donors is me, I can say categorically that if my donation isn't allocated as part of a prize that I will place it with SPI for use at some undetermined point in the future. I suspect this is a conversation I will be having with the various donors after the competition has closed and that each will ultimately take their own view on what they wish to do. Back now.. http://www.openvas.org/openvas-contest.html. Cheers, Tim

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Michael Schultheiss — 2008-09-26T18:39:46

The CPA said he would look into this and get back to me on Monday, September 29, 2008.

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Josh Berkus — 2008-09-26T17:48:10

Tim, One issue with this: you *must* tell your prize donors that you intend to use surplus funds for general OpenVAS expenses. Donor intent is protected by law in the US. I'd comment on the contest rules, but I've been completely unable to access them online. --Josh

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Michael Schultheiss — 2008-09-26T17:42:18

I apologize for the lack of official communication. I was unable to find my initial request to the legal and financial advisors in my sent mail so I redrafted the request and added a request for an ETA of a response if they must do further research. I'll get back to you as soon as I hear back from the advisors. Money that is not allocated as prize money should be able to be earmarked for future OpenVAS with little difficulty.

Re: Up to date statements of account?

Josh Berkus — 2008-09-26T17:00:27

All, Current status is that we're up to date on checks, Click & Pledge CC, and expenses. We're currently doing manual entry of Network4Good and Paysimple*, as neither vendor seems capable of producing a report which is automatically importable. Then we need to sanity-check everything. --Josh (*=look for a future suggestion that we abandon Paysimple as a bad job)

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Tim Brown — 2008-09-26T16:18:45

Firstly, apologies for dropping a grenade but I thought it was relevant in the context of treasurer interactions with member projects. It isn't a problem in this case if the answer is that SPI are waiting on legal advice but I wanted to guage whether a response would be forthcoming. To be fair Michael said as much in an IRC conversation some weeks back, but there was no official communication to this effect. My email to treasurer< at >spi-inc.org identified by message ID 200807241929.39739.timb< at >nth-dimension.org.uk was sent on Thursday, 24th July 2008 at 19:29:35 +0100. With respect to getting an ETA, that would be very useful as it will allow myself and the others making donations towards to prize money to guage whether we need to make alternate arrangements. As I have already said to Michael there are at least 2 legal entities this side of the pond that could handle it, but as they are "for profit" it makes things interesting from a tax perspective. There an additional question of how to h

Re: OpenVas plugin development (was Up to date statement of Account)

Wichert Akkerman — 2008-09-26T15:41:12

Can we ask counsel for an ETA on an answer? Wichert.