DDF and Xaraya licensing concerns

OK so that seems to be confusing more people.
hmm I'll try again.

First off the DDF is a legal entity. Its a registered company and we are 
in the process of obtaining 501c3 tax registered status from the IRS.

Second it is not a case of developers signing away their rights.
The license we ask core developers (and only core developers) to agree 
to grants the DDF rights to the Xaraya code. It is a non-exclusive 
agreement. So the developers still retain the copyright on that code 
outside of Xaraya, should they submit it to say another project then 
they are free to do so and it would not involve Xaraya or the DDF.

We have not publicised much about the DDF yet since the website isn't 
finalised yet - we were waiting for Xaraya to reach beta first. The DDF 
bylaws are very similar to the Apache Foundation. It has an elected 
Board of Directors, a lawyer, accountant, etc... all the usual features 
you would expect of any registered company. Since the Xaraya core team 
makes up the DDF membership then it will only act in the best interests 
of the Xaraya project. No one person in the DDF can railroad policy over 
the others - quorum votes are needed from the 35 or so members in order 
for changes to the bylaws, membership or other decisions to be made.
The DDF has no say in the day to day running of Xaraya - that is up to 
the PMC (John, Marcel, Paul and Gregor), all of whom are of course 
members of the DDF as are all the PostNuke developers who left to form 
Xaraya, along with some others.

There are defined means for removing a member of both the PMC and the 
Board of directors. The exact same process as Apache uses. Again its a 
legally registered company and so we must follow the recognised process 
for this. There is no way anyone or even a small group could enforce 
their will over the majority - a simple vote would put paid to that.

I can understand how misunderstandings could occur as nothing about the 
DDF had been made public to date (as already stated we were waiting for 
the beta to launch the website which contains all this information). For 
a rough guide do look at the Apache Foundation. the model is the same.

I hope this has alleviated some people's worries. If anyone has any 
questions please do let me know - I'm more than happy to answer them.

miko