2015 H1 Vision

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Sun, 2015-02-01 at 22:46 +0100, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 2/1/15, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce <
> digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> > http://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2015H1
> 
> - Create the D Language Foundation
> 
> What exactly is this idea about, can you elaborate a bit?

Given involvement with SCons (which used to have a foundation, but it 
seems to have lapsed, but we need it), and Groovy (never had one but 
almost certainly needs one now), I see three main issues:

— A centralized organization supporting the distributed FOSS project, 
giving other organizations a generalized single point of contact. Also 
having an organization, not just a collection of individuals, given 
other organizations confidence in support, continuity and development.

— A legally established foundation can be the holder of IP. It makes 
any debates about licencing, etc. easier if there is a single entity 
to deal with. Really though this is more to keep other organizations 
happy and confident.

— A foundation can be a funds collection and redistribution entity. 
Again stuff can happen without a central "not for profit" 
organization, but it generates confidence in other organizations if 
there is one. Strong rather than small intermittent funded activity is 
more likely with a foundation than without.
  
Then you get the questions of where (in which jurisdiction), and who 
are the "directors" and how do they get changed.

There are many "off-the-shelf" organizational structures so it is 
"pick one". The problem of jurisdiction is more difficult these days. 
The usual knee-jerk reaction is "create a 'not for profit' in the 
USA". (Actually for D, like SCons, this is probably the most sensible 
start point; for Groovy it is far more difficult and less the right 
choice.) Unofficial legal opinion is that the USA government is 
currently very anti any new software language foundations. If true, 
that makes the Python Software Foundation model not viable. This would 
leave joining Eclipse or Apache (not really viable for D or SCons I 
suspect), or the Software Conservancy. A number of projects have gone 
this route, SCons is considering it since re-establishing a fully 
independent SCons Foundation is seeming an up-hill struggle.

I am not a lawyer.
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder