9:40 a.m.
Hello!
Mark Wielaard <mjw(a)gnu.org> skribis:
> To me, fiscal sponsorship is unrelated to governance.
>
> But I agree it’s also an important issue for those of us involved:
> toolchain, Guix, and probably Mailman, Octave, and MediaGoblin:
>
> https://www.fsf.org/working-together/fund
>
> In Guix we’re still discussing what to do, but I think we should discuss
> this among all these projects at some point.
Having a fiscal sponsor, or a legal entity, is related to governance
to me because without it we cannot hold any resources. Then we are
just a bunch of hackers where individuals have DNS, pay for hosting,
individually collect money to hold a meeting, etc. Now I trust those
individuals and it is a form of governance, but it is very fragile and
you are totally relying on a few people to not go crazy or get drunk
on power :)
I’m not sure. Some projects don’t have a “bank account” and thus no
need for a fiscal sponsor (that’s the case of Guile and GSL, for
example).
For others, fiscal matters are not central to the project and dealt with
separately, possibly by a separate team. In Guix, the “spending
committee”, which approves spending from the FSF fund, is a group
separate from co-maintainers (though with a non-empty intersection). By
far most of the “governance activity” in Guix has nothing to do with
funds.
Perhaps Carlos can confirm, but I’m also pretty sure that toolchain
maintainers don’t worry about funds in their day-to-day maintenance and
governance work.
All in all, I would rather let each project take care of its funds and
fiscal sponsorship by itself (but the discussion on how to switch
sponsors should be collective). Ideally there’d be a strong GNU group
with its own fiscal sponsor, which could act on behalf its member
projects. But we’re verrrry far from that. Let’s first save what can
still be saved.
WDYT?
Ludo’.