Re: Incorporation for what reason?

[email protected] writes:
 > Dear forum, but especially dear core team,
 > 
 > There is one thing i don't understand. If XFree86 was incorporated years ago for the *sole* and *only* purpose to be able to become a member of X.org (sorry for not quoting, I don't have the list in an easily searchable form right now, but that's what has been said on this just very fresh list), then why the private mailing lists, the closed development (the core team "issue")?

You mean the X Consortium, not X.org, but that's OK.
There is no 'closed development'. There used to be, but that
was abandoned some years ago.
Development is open in the sense that you can get CVS snapshots
any time you want - with the risk that they may not always compile or
work the way you want. It is closed in the sense that CVS write access
is limited. So far patches have been sent to a mailing list, picked up
from there by developers and merged into the code.
This procedure has been somewhat intransparent: you had to check the
changelog for your submission ID. If you didn't find your patch you
didn't know if or why it was rejected.
With the bugzilla in place patch submissions can also be done there
so this issue should become moot.
The Core Team never had anything to do with the incorporation.
The BOD did. And yes the BOD still exists, as you need it for
the incorporation to exist. We need the incorporation to keep
money in the bank without having to pay taxes (as a non-profit 
organization). Money comes in handy when we have to pay membership 
dues, pay the annual fee for our DNS entry, etc..

 > 
 > Maybe you will say, but we are the corporation, and we can do that if we just want to. That's right. But it also defeats the original purpose of the incorporation, to just be able to become a member of X.org and nothing more.
 > 
 > I wonder if the structures within XFree86 Inc. were already envisoned before the incorporation, or only after XFree86 already was such a one for some time.

There are no big structures. The incorporation is organized so
that the legal requirements for a non-profit organization are 
met with the least amount of hassel.
Have you ever looked at the bylaws? Have you ever wondered why
they are written the way they are? That's why!

In the country where I live a non-profit organization requires
lot more work.

 > 
 > I hope you agree with me that private mailing lists on an open project that is not a corporation would at least look strange to the public. The corporation allows you to do that with all social (implicit) justification, but at the price, so it seems, of it's original intention.

There are no private mailing list any more, other than core and
the bod.  bod is needed if somebody needs to interact with
XFree86 as an incorporation. It is odd but if you are a company and
you want for example donate stuff, you want a contact address rather 
than posting on a public mailing list: 'ACME Corporation would like to
donate a 4GHz Dual P4 as CVS server to XFree86', wouldn't you?

The Core Team has a more technical focus. Yes, it meets non-public
but this is not too unusual for an OpenSource project.

 > 
 > I am not trying to pull a development to the better and the open back to a stage dealing with twisted issues which seem to become non-issues in feasible time, but this seems very blatant and striking.
 > 

I think there have been a lot of misconceptions in the past.
But I hope this mailing list helps to explain how things really
are.

Egbert.