FLOSS Foundations at OSCON 2005

The summit is a place for the people who try to Get Stuff Done at the various non-profits around open source to congregate, share information, and pick each others’ brains. This was the first FLOSS summit.

When? Where?

July 30 and 31 in Portland, OR. The summit was held immediately before OSCON, at the Oregon Convention Center.

Who?

Final attendee list:

  • Allison Randal, president of the Perl Foundation (organizer of the summit)
  • David Ascher, director of the Python Software Foundation
  • Josh Berkus, core member of PostgreSQL
  • Paula Le Dieu (Creative Commons)
  • Paul Everitt, Plone Foundation
  • Roberto Ierusalimschy, creator of Lua
  • Scott Kveton, Open Source Lab
  • Ted Leung, Open Source Applications Foundation
  • Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation
  • Bill Odom, steering committee chair of the Perl Foundation
  • Russ Nelson, board member of OSI
  • Alex Russell, Dojo Foundation
  • Chris Messina, Round Two
  • Corey Shields, Gentoo Linux Foundation
  • Donnie Berkholz, Gentoo Linux Foundation (Sunday only)

For the legal section (Sunday only):

  • Roberta Cairney
  • Larry Rosen
  • Cliff Schmidt, ASF

Unable to attend:

  • David Neary, GNOME Foundation
  • Brian Behlendorf, Apache Software Foundation regrets, prior plans
  • Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD, OpenSSH)
  • Greg Stein, ASF sorry, arriving Tuesday
  • Mark Wielaard (Classpath Leader)
  • Eben Moglen
  • Andrew St. Laurent
  • Bdale Garbee, SPI / Debian regrets (family conflict)
  • Sally Whitehead, Sophos regrets
  • Linus Torvalds, Linux / OSDL regrets (family conflict)
  • Danese Cooper, board member of the Open Source Initiative regrets (family conflict)
  • Michael Tiemann, President of OSI regrets
  • Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation regrets
  • Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation regrets
  • Jeff Waugh, Ubuntu / GNOME regrets, arriving Monday
  • Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation regrets
  • Geir Magnusson, ASF regrets
  • Andrew Morton, Linux / OSDL
  • Bruce Perens, SPI
  • Sam Ruby, Apache Software Foundation
  • Bruno Souza (SouJava President - large NGO in Brazil)
  • Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia
  • Bradley Kuhn (FSF)
  • Jeffrey Thompson, IBM

Other suggested invitations:

  • Head of Mambo Project (incorporating soon)
  • Someone from FreeBSD
  • someone from EFF?
  • someone from FSF (as distinct from SFLA)
  • Someone from KDE (Aaron Seigo?)

Agenda

The first two topics were discussed on the first day, and the last two topics on the second day.

Non-Profit Status: Community

  • How do different projects manage themselves?
  • What works? What doesn’t?
  • What problems have you encountered that others have solved?
  • Designing for success…engagement models for communities
  • Relationships between Boards and developer communities.
  • Corporate participation in foundation leadership.
  • What policies do you need to have in place to herd the cats?
  • How can we better work together?
  • What possibilities are there for inter-foundation collaboration?

Donors

  • What do they want?
  • How to deal with them.
  • How to make them happy without selling out.
  • Revenue models for non-profits.
  • Working with communities to develop strategies suited to specific needs.
  • Tools for keeping projects open and productive.
  • Tools for decreasing risks of lawsuits (contributor agreements), etc.
  • Trademark guidelines - can guidelines for the use of trademarks be legally rigorous, readable and sufficiently permissive for community group needs?
  • Developing and servicing a trademark
  • Contract negotiation (part of trademark development)
  • Mixing business and charity: what Board member activities can get you in hot water.
  • Can 501(c)(3)s and equivalent fund OSS development?
  • Going international: how to create a multi-region non-profit.
  • D&O Insurance…do you need it?

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