Annual Discussion with openSUSE Board: Adding a legal structure to openSuse
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DeMaio, Douglas
Braun, Axel
Et al.
The openSUSE Board will present the outcome of their last F2F meeting, where they started driving its collective agenda for the next year. After that, everybody is welcome to ask questions, give feedback, make suggestions and present ideas.
 Right. Yeah, thanks everybody for coming. This is the fun part of, well, fun. Hopefully, everybody's having fun at the whole conference. Yeah, so the regular annual sort of conference board meeting. Last year, we had a whole bunch of topics and we kind of rambled on about all of them for the better part of an hour and then had questions at the end. This one is a little bit different because if you've been kind of keeping up with the mailing lists, there's pretty much only one topic that's on the board's mind at the moment, this idea of a foundation or some legal structure. And, yeah, we're going to be talking about this now. And please, if you have any thoughts, comments, questions as we go along, the microphone at the end is always open and we can kind of just work our way through it as we go. And Axel, I think we said you would start explaining what we're thinking and why we're doing this. So over to you now. Yeah, we'll do. Thank you, Rich. Yeah, welcome everybody to the board meeting, to the question and answer session, ask the board. As Richard already mentioned, we spent a lot of time this year in investigating whether we need a legal structure and if we need one, what would be the ideal one. So to spend some words upfront, I mean, we all know Zuzan Open Zuzan have common roots, history and values. So we are basically sharing the genetics and we're also sharing the logo for the most part. And I think this is a great benefit, a win-win situation for both of us, which we definitely want to keep. So everything that we're doing here is not to separate us from Zuzan. It is to gain more flexibility for the Open Zuzan community. What we've noticed in organizing the last conferences but as well in sponsoring other projects or receiving money from sponsors, it is an issue that the Open Zuzan community has no legal entity behind it. And if there is a company, for example, that wants to sponsor us or we as a community think this project is beneficial and we want to donate some money for it, we just can't do it at the moment. Just for legal and as well for tax reasons. So the idea is now let's put a legal structure in behind of Open Zuzan. And just to kind of add a little bit of extra context from the Zuzan side. Zuzan is keen and always trying to help Open Zuzan in these kind of things, like taking sponsorship like arranging hardware and providing services, but just with the nature of the fact it is a company, when dealing with other companies, suddenly things like donations become way more complicated because an external company might not want to give Zuzan a huge chunk of money and dealing with things like invoices and taxes with the lack of an Open Zuzan legal entity gets complicated with that. So it's not a case of Zuzan doesn't want to help with that, but just because of the nature of the organization that it is, it can't. So yeah, I think the motivations we have already mentioned partnering with organizations out of Zuzan, receiving donations, being able to give donations as well to other projects. And so also what Richard mentioned in case we need some additional hardware, some services, something like that, we could easily sign a contract with another company to provide us this service, even if it's on a free basis for us so that they are charging their e-forces and getting a kind of a donation received from our end. All this is currently not possible. So we have investigated various options, various legal options. What could they be? First of all, a so-called foundation in German, a Stiftung. This is a model under different legal or local legal legislations. What was that the right word? I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. That other projects like, for example, the Document Foundation who's driving the development of Libra Office have chosen. A German one is the so-called EV, an eingetragener Verein. We've translated this now with an association. This is a fairly simple thing to set up. You just need seven people. You pull a template from a website, from the court website, fill it in, go to court and get registered. Another option could be an umbrella organization. That means we are joining an organization like what are they called, Rich, SPF or something like that? SPI or the Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation. These umbrellas that exist either help provide these kind of services for open source projects or be home for them more legally. Right. Yeah. Thanks. In that case, the umbrella organization would sign the contracts and receive a fee from us. For example, I don't know what that charging 10% of the donations or whatever. Option four, we keep it as it is, which is of course not the intention that we're having. To make a very, very long discussion short, the proposal of the board is the SoCOND Foundation. The reason for this is the foundation based on its setup, on its rules, is much, much more stable like the EV, like the eingetragener Verein. In the worst case, just a construction, but not far from reality. We get a bunch of new members into the EV and they are suddenly changing the purpose of OpenSUSE from providing a community and developing a distribution to selling t-shirts or whatever. And if they can get a qualified majority, they can do that. And then OpenSUSE as such is gone. And this is something that we strictly want to avoid. We want to get some legal independence, but we want to make sure that the structure of OpenSUSE and the purpose of it as a non-profit organization dealing with free software keeps persistent. And the ideal legal form that we could found up to now is the foundation. And from the SUSE side of things, one of the unique aspects when talking to SUSE about this is, of course, like we said at the beginning, keeping that closeness and that relationship is a key part, both from the community and the board's motivations, but also from SUSE's. And looking at how other projects have done this, there's lots of OpenSUSE projects out there that have an EV. And sometimes they have some of these problems with influence, sometimes they don't. But no one really has built a foundation or built an EV in the open source world in the circumstances that we're doing this. Normally it's a case of a project starting from the ground up and they need some legal entity just so they can exist. Or they're forming their foundation or their EV in response to a nasty situation with their previous corporate sponsor. And therefore the foundation is some lifeboat of independence to get away from the nasty corporate entity. The one of the things we have here is we want to stay close with SUSE. SUSE wants to stay close with OpenSUSE. But we want the foundation for the purposes we've been talking about. How do you model that? How do we structure that? So the foundation is solid and stable in its own right and solid and stable with its relationship with SUSE. Basically, can we use this foundation approach to codify into law the weird and wonderful and unique relationship we have with SUSE? And that's where we're investigating now and why we've chosen this route compared to the others where the legal framework might be looser and therefore actually harder to pin down the key parts we want to keep. So one of the main benefits of a foundation over an EV, for example, is we can keep the way the OpenSUSE board is founded. We can keep the way membership works. The organization of OpenSUSE, as it exists at the moment, can basically stay as it is and will continue to be as it is. But we now have a legal entity behind us to support that, which is, whereas if you go for an EV, there is rules about how the board is made, how the members are made up, and that's not necessarily what we're doing at the moment, which would be a big change. Yeah, in terms of running both organizations, an EV as well as a foundation, they have similar taxation and accounting rules, so we are not gaining a benefit from one or the other. In terms of setup, the foundation is slightly more afford, but we can also take advantage there from the experiences that, for example, the document foundation has already made. So they have already been preparing the ground with German legal authorities to set up a foundation for a free software project. So my proposal is before we describe the potential next steps, what are your questions or remarks? Anybody? Hans? Yeah, much closer. Just to add to this question, I have, as you're probably aware, I've set up several foundations and EVs in the cultural sector in the Netherlands, and my experience is also that if you indeed have a very singular focus in mind, you want to do long term, and especially also in keeping contractual relationship with upstream partners like Suzer, a foundation is much more stable. What you see in the cultural sector is that the association model works for individual artists working together, collaborating on certain projects, but you very rarely see it for things like festival organizations or whatnot. So I'm absolutely convinced for you that you've chosen the right type of entity. I also think that if you look at associations as they are co-ordered in the, like the Drupal Association, which is a governing board for the Drupal community, they are not actually an association in the legal sense, they are a foundation. And because they are a foundation, they can actually organize, receive sponsorships and whatnot. So just my two cents, I think you're doing the right thing. And on a personal note, I'm very happy to finally see this materialized because I've tried to sponsor Open Suzer conference before. In 2013, I've managed to sponsor it. Don't ask me how it works. And then in 2015, I organized Open Suzer conference. So don't ask me how it works. But it's awesome to see you pushing this forward. So compliments to the board. Yeah, thanks Hans. Other questions? Anna. You have said that at the moment it's not possible that we donate money to other organizations and that is not true. I mean, we are sponsoring at the moment many, many, many organizations, many conferences, and we are doing it at the moment with Suzer's money. And we are speaking about quite a lot of money. And then my question is, in the moment we have the foundation, we will, you say Open Suzer will be able to do these donations, I wonder with money. I mean, is Suzer going to give us some, or give Open Suzer some budget? Or how is it going to happen? What's happened with travel support, for example? So I guess the Open Suzer being able to give to other people, we already do. But potentially, that always goes through Suzer. So this would give the board the opportunity to go under these exceptional circumstances. We want to give money to someone else where we haven't, without going through Suzer, which we haven't done in the past. But that's probably, of all the reasons we've given, the being able to give money to other people is the far lesser reason than being able to receive money. So I'll speak in with two hats on. First is, current Open Suzer Treasurer. We don't do a huge amount of sponsorships of other projects. We regularly sponsor GNOME, KDE. We have an arrangement with Fedora where we sponsor each other. But it's not, if we want to sponsor a project, we still have to go through Suzer, get the approvals. And there are times where we would like to sponsor a project or a community or an event, et cetera, that may be close to conflicting with Suzer, for whatever reason, being a company with commercial requirements, et cetera. They have much stricter sensibilities about some of these things, whereas as a community, we are much more relaxed about those concerns. So that's one aspect. Yes, we do do sponsorship, but we could be better with the sponsorship that we're doing. My other hat on is, as a sponsor of the Open Suzer conference, it's really complicated to get the money to sponsor the conference. So I've got budget. I want to provide that budget to Open Suzer for the conference. It's really complicated because if we just give it directly to Suzer, it has to go through Suzer's accounting, et cetera, whatnot, and then it could quite easily and has done, long go in the past, got lost in somebody's cost center, et cetera. We have an arrangement at the moment for the It's of Open Suzer to be able to receive the money for us who can then do something in return. But that's not necessarily the best way of handling that money. If we could provide that money directly to the Open Suzer project, the project can then go, okay, this partner is very generous in their sponsorship donation. We only need to use X amount for the conference. We then have additional sponsorship funding that we can then procure either hardware or we can put additional funds towards TSP, et cetera. By doing a foundation, et cetera, it's actually beneficial for Suzer from a financial perspective. Being a non-profit, et cetera, there are tax benefits, obviously. So we're not saying that we don't want Suzer's money and we don't want Suzer to participate in any aspect of the project. We most certainly want them to participate and it's not about independence. This is more about less dependence and somewhat more autonomy to make our own decisions to do things, but still being able to keep that connection close. I understand that it will be easy to operate, but still, any of you say answer my question, where is the money coming from? Because if we have no money, then we cannot donate anything. Have we already spoken something with Suzer? Will they give us some money? Nothing is set in stone with any of this because it needs the agreement of the community, it needs the agreement of Suzer. We're at the stage now where we can talk about this and we've had discussions with Suzer at this level. The general ideas are along the lines of at least some of the budget that Suzer currently has for sponsoring Open Suzer and the other stuff around that would almost certainly be a regular donation to this foundation. We don't have the numbers. That's to be discussed and negotiated and figured out. Given this model of doing everything we're currently doing plus the new stuff, we don't necessarily need the numbers in the sense of we do okay now, we do sponsor stuff, we make it work somehow. Even if the foundation starts with pretty much zero, we learn our lessons that way, we develop it over time, and then Suzer could end up finding, okay, well, now we can stop worrying about all the conference nonsense and make it the foundation's problem. The nice thing with this model is we can kind of organically grow it as we figure out how it works from all sides. Sorry. I'm kind of excited to see how this is going to play out, but there's a couple of things that I'm a little unclear about. The first one is currently today with, for example, the Open Suzer Build service, there is this list in the top right corner of all the sponsors and stuff. I don't know exactly how that kind of arrangement thing is going, but have you guys thought about how we could either make that a process that is a little bit more clear or obvious, or how to preserve that relationship? Because from what I understand, Suzer provides the overwhelming majority of those resources there. How would we make sure that we don't accidentally get into a situation where we're suddenly starved of all the things, and those are the kinds of unpleasant things that nobody likes to think about, but it's like you don't want to be put into that situation. Okay. I'll take it. Yeah, with that kind of thing, the concerns of stuff that Suzer's currently providing, like the Build service, is this going to scare them away? This is, we've already started these discussions. We had Thomas the Jack-O-Moe here on the first day of the conference. He came out with the board for a dinner the night before the conference. We basically gave him this presentation. We basically had this discussion. From Suzer's side, Suzer is committed to keeping Open Suzer on this footing. It is right now, and helping it to expand. These discussions are not scaring anybody at Suzer. That's why we're doing them this way to make sure that doesn't happen. With regards to the Build service, as somebody that has arranged donations to the Build service, it's complicated having to go through the corporate structures, etc., because of the legalese and all that sort of stuff. Having a less dependent entity makes things much, much easier. We can actually grow that sponsorship. There are companies and willing sponsors who want to sponsor the project, but refuse to deal with going through a corporate entity, because they don't trust Suzer. They just want to make sure that 110% of that goes to the intended recipient, which is Open Suzer. For example, we have one sponsor, I can't remember exactly which one, where that was the case. You had all the usual negotiations about sponsorship and hardware transfer, and then because they wanted to be absolutely sure that that hardware was being used by Open Suzer, additional contracts had to be signed up. This hardware is being transferred to Suzer Linux GNBH for the sole purposes of being used by Open Suzer. That gets complicated after all. This really hopefully knocks some of that stuff down, so that stuff becomes easier for all of us on Suzer side and on Open Suzer side. Next question. Yeah. First of all, I think this is a good idea, because I was asking for it the last three years already. You can help anytime. Yeah. The thing is that actually, I guess, I don't worry a lot about money and a lot about the donation thing because this unleaves a lot of potential, I guess. The only thing I worry about or the only thing I would ask about is what will be the actually continuity in working thing. So how will the board be set up in future? Will there be some legal thing of the foundation or not? Like will there be some written thing, how the board will be set up? Is there already a draft or not that we can read? What will be the role of the share man in this? Will this be still elected by Suzer or not? Will we all become members of the Open Suzer foundation or not? Are there rules? Yeah, there are. And so on. This is an important thing for me. You can trust me, there will not be only one page of Britain, probably 110 or something like that. At the moment, if you look at the Wiki page for Open Suzer, there is the existing rules that we define how the board is elected. There is the existing rules for how members or who can be a member that Richard needs to put back there. But basically the idea is without having gone through a lawyer yet, fundamentally we don't want that structure to change. The chairman will still be appointed by Suzer. I didn't ask for that by the way. No. The board will still be voted by the members in the same way it is now. These rules have a current clause that we can have a vote and half the members can change those rules. So if it comes to a point in the future where we think the members think that should be changed, they'll be free to vote on that and change that structure. But we're not planning on changing that in a drastic way. To give you an idea about the next steps that we currently foresee, probably not complete. First of all, this discussion will start it again or continue it on the Open Suzer project mailing list. At a certain point in time then we will have a vote of the members whether they agree to go to a foundation structure. And then if we have a qualified majority, then we will kick off the next step. That means for example that we sit together with lawyers, with experts to discuss how the charter of the foundation should look like. And this charter will be phrased in that way that our position as NGO for free software will be more or less carved in stone. As Simon already said, we will try to keep the rest as it is. And as soon as we then have the foundation set up, the current members of the Open Suzer project can opt in to go into this foundation. For legal reasons we cannot force you to go over there. But you receive a mail and say, yeah, I want to go for the Open Suzer foundation. And then your membership is transferred one by one into the Open Suzer foundation. In parallel to that on the mailing list, I will be talking to Suzer about getting their support for helping logistically things like assigning budgets to help us, for example, maybe fund a lawyer. So we have legal advice for this, separate from Suzer's lawyers. So there's no conflict of interest there. After the charter, of course, almost certainly we'll have a second membership vote of actually accepting the charter. So the community is going to be deciding the absolute fate on this. But that's the current where we are today. Next question. So you've explained why a foundation rather than an EV and that all makes total sense. What about an umbrella organization like LAF or SPI? Is that any... So for the vast majority of them, we are too big and we'll create too much work so they don't want to. They all charge around a 10% fee. And so we can probably, with the amount of money coming through, we would instead be able to use that money to fund someone or ask Suzer nicely to fund someone to do the management for us. So the board doesn't expect to have to sit down and run the foundation doing all the explicit work. And to kind of give a personal add-on, I mean, I was personally quite fond of, even with those things, quite fond of looking at like SPI, because it's what the Debian are using, for example, for an arch. And SPI is a 503C charity in the States. And in Europe, because of course, lots of us are in Europe here, they have a chapter, a friendly association of ffi.ev, who basically do the same things, take money, they work together. Looking at this recently, we've suddenly realized like SPI and FFI aren't really talking to each other anymore. And that kind of thing makes you realize, okay, jumping from a situation of a good working relationship with one entity to then being totally dependent on another, which you don't have as good a relationship with the other. So let's kind of push this a little bit towards the foundation idea. We can build something here that is rock solid on like every side of the aspect. So I also applaud this decision. I think foundation is a good way to go. However, there is some caveat. And I was on a board of an organization which used to be a foundation, lots more than Open Sews, of course, that was the XORC Foundation, which eventually ended up under the umbrella of SPI for a very simple reason. The board was constantly struggling because we didn't have access to legal counsel, unless we of course paid a lawyer. We didn't have access to accounting, so it was always a struggle to file taxes. International money transfer was really difficult. We didn't, sometimes we didn't know how to do this, and all of these things got resolved by going under an umbrella because they had all these services and knew how to do all these things. So maybe this is not an issue here. And I certainly think that it's a better solution than an umbrella as well. So one of the conditions that the board has put fairly firmly on going forward in this way is to partner with SUSE for them to provide us with someone who can help us do the accounting side, do the legal side. We haven't obviously looked at the specifics of what that will look like yet, but one of the key points is we would like someone, we would like either SUSE to fund Open SUSE to the level that Open SUSE can employ someone to do that, or SUSE or employ someone on Open SUSE's behalf to take care of those things so that it is not something that the project has to worry about. SUSE has quite a commitment to providing Open SUSE with everything they need. They haven't changed that commitment. That commitment is still ongoing. And as we've discussed this with SUSE, we've seen this is just an extent, that sort of role as an extension of that commitment to provide Open SUSE with everything it needs. I have a question that's logistic of the money is understandable, but what about the people? I mean, that's the people that's working in SUSE supporting the project, etc. If there are any case that Open SUSE then we'll start to hire the people to work on their priorities because they think that this or that project should go this way and SUSE think differently. Will there be some separation in this manner or not? That's a good question. I'll let Andrew answer it. So there's an example of where Open SUSE has gone in a different direction to where SUSE is going and that's cubic. Okay, so you've got cast from SUSE. An episode of us from 300 Bus. Open SUSE went down the cubic route, SUSE went down the cast route and they're quite divergent. And that's a healthy competition, if you will. It's just like if you're two siblings, two brothers, two sisters, whatever, there's always an element of competition trying to be better than the other one, but at the end of the day you're still part of a family and you come to an agreement ultimately at the end of the day, one shape or another. I think for me this approach isn't, as I mentioned, it's not about independence. It's about enhancing the existing relationship, giving us a little bit more flexibility. As an example in the past when the Document Foundation was founded, SUSE were a founding member but due to commercial requirements and reasons they had to withdraw their seat. Now we wanted to ensure that we kept that relationship with the TDF because it's close to everyone's hearts, etc. So we had to work on getting somebody from the open SUSE community to stand in and replace the SUSE seat. It's an example of where we have different views but we actually work together well. So even though we're doing something differently to what SUSE is doing, it actually benefits both of us. So I think it's not something that the Board has actively discussed, being able to employ people to do certain things. If we ever got to the position where we had enough money though and a future Board wanted to look at it, I think it's important that the structure we set up will therefore allow that. That's actually another reason why some of the umbrella organisations don't work because they make it very hard to employ people. Putting my SUSE Chairman hat on now, one of the first concerns raised by senior management SUSE as we discussed this, this all sounds really good, but SUSE wants to make sure that whatever opens SUSE creates there, it's always going to be open for SUSE to be able to contribute to. That's going to be one of the things that we've already agreed. We all want that. So we don't necessarily know how we're going to reflect that into the charter of the Foundation, but that's definitely something that we aim to have reflected in the charter of the Foundation. So whatever happens, the open SUSE project is always there for SUSE to contribute to and be part of, and there will always be a healthy working relationship with that. I would like to ask about what for me is the most important aspect of the Foundation that I haven't heard yet. What happened with transparency? Is it going open SUSE to make public what we are spending the money on if we have a Foundation? When I say make public, I mean publishing who we are giving money to, the amount, the date, so completely public? Without having the legal advice, what I would say is that the intention certainly is to be completely transparent. There may be areas where some funding or some line items can't be reported for legal issues, but as an example, we could show what's being spent on staffing. If we have to employ a secretary or something like that for those things, then yes, that would be shown on the accounting. We can show, like I say, this is all without legal verification. I don't see an issue with showing how much is being spent on TSP, how much is being spent on sponsorships, but it's still needing to be discussed and verified. I'm going to give my personal view anyway. One of the things I'm really excited with this is the ability to make a lot of this stuff which we just can't make transparent now, way more transparent. If you look at the examples out there, how KDEV do it, which is somewhat narrow, you see the big bins of what KDEV is spending, but not more compared to the TDF, where it's a little bit more extensive. I would personally want to lead to more the TDF's example of really pushing the transparency as far as we can at legal advice permit it. So not exactly legal advice here, but in the Netherlands we have a special tax exemption status for foundation. It's a foundation for doing, let's say, useful projects in communities. They have very clear rules and regulations about what you must report on in your annual papers. It's pretty much as transparent as you can get it. So if the foundation open-suser is aspiring for once to have that kind of tax breaks, then you automatically end up being quite transparent in basically anything. There are certain areas, at least in the Netherlands, in which you can avoid having to name sponsors by name if a sponsor doesn't want that. So then you have to address this to the tax service directly, then you don't have to publish the name of the sponsor in your annual reports, but you have to inform the tax authorities on that procedure. So by definition, this will be much more transparent than it ever can be when integrated in a company, and there's rules for that. Of course I was not speaking about the things that are illegal. I mean, if you cannot publish something, you cannot. But for example, saying how much money you spend in conferences, I mean, that you tell me you spend 10,000 euros in conferences, say me absolutely nothing. And I don't think it will be legal to say what conference and how much amount of money we are giving every conference we spend. So I think that is the kind of transparency I was speaking about. I mean, of course, you employ a secretary. I don't want that you tell me the name. I don't need that. I don't want that we are spending that amount of money on personnel. Let me share the example of the TDF. All the ledgers are published. Obviously, there are some numbers that are aggregated because you can't share how much you are paying a particular employer, for example, but everything is available. You can go on the website, on the foundation section of the website, and you can download the ledgers. And then you can see how much is spent for the conference, for the annual conference, how many donations the foundation is receiving. So you can obviously see everything. And if you have time, you can also do the maths and at the end understand where the money are going. In any case, if you don't want to deal with the spreadsheet or if you are not an expert in budget, and it's not something really immediate to understand and to read, for example, TDF is producing an annual report with all the details about the activities done by the community and there is also the financial part that describes how the donations are spent, which are the plans for the next year. So you can have everything. Obviously, we need to discuss the details for the OpenSource Foundation, but the Document Foundation is a foundation that is a German one in Berlin, so probably will be something similar. But that it is possible to do, I'm pretty sure. So my question is, is OpenSource going this direction or try to make public everything that is possible? Yeah, absolutely. This one is the idea. Obviously, I'm not a legal, but I'm the chairperson for TDF, so I saw the details on that side of the foundation and I can answer that it's possible. So why not to go on this direction? This one is the idea. A good bit of experience, I guess. I've been involved in running Linux ConfAU in Australia one year and that's put on by Linux Australia, which is an incorporated association in Australia, which tries to be as transparent as possible about all things. And so LA will publish figures for how much it spends when it runs conferences. It gives community grants to people. It will say how much we spend on grants and things and it will be as transparent as it can be about all those things. So all of that gets released somehow. But where it gets tricky is money received as sponsorship for conferences that it runs because if you've got, say, Red Hat and Suzer and Ubuntu all sponsoring the same conference and all appearing at the same level of sponsor, they may actually have paid slightly different amounts of money each depending on exactly what they negotiated with who was running sponsor liaison. And so the organisation can't say individually how much each sponsor of a given level contributed or we would piss off our sponsors. But we can say as a whole how much was received. So I don't know if that's sort of an example of the sort of tricky things you can have with wanting complete transparency but not, you know, being able to get as close as you can if you like. Next question from anybody? Comments? Feedback? No? Yes? No? Okay. So what do we have next? One thing I would like to point out is that we as a board are presenting this idea but we need all of you. I've been around for 15 years in the Suzer and Open Suzer communities and I've seen this discussion before and not just a single time. And the last times it didn't work because, mainly because we as a community did not step up and do things. It can't be done by the board on its own. We need your input. We need your feedback. So please help out if this community is dear to your heart. Yep. And yeah, that's it. Thank you very much. Christian has, Christian always has some more things. One last thing in the board meeting, so I had a bet with the board like do you manage to send out all the meeting minutes until the conference? If I would have managed that, then yesterday you would have seen me with a green hat so that you have something to laugh about me. And then I thought let's turn that bit around and we have exactly one person who has to send out minutes from March. Here's your hat. Thank you very much. It's his so pretty girl. Yes. Well, that's now up to you. Thanks. Okay. So, all right. Thanks for being here. The next part is a giveaway of a tuxedo laptop. So if you could put your hand underneath your chair, you might find a 3D printed Gecko. Anybody? There might, I mean it might be around you. You can check. It's a distraction. Anybody? Really? I wonder if it dropped. 3D? Well, I'll just see a mad rush. It's somewhere in that area over there. Kind of, kind of taped to the bottom right in the front. Look at that. There we go. Come on up here. Go ahead. No, it's fine. I don't know anything. So this lovely gift is sponsored from tuxedo computers. What model is it? Oh, okay. It's a brand spanking new 15 inch laptop from tuxedo with a customized back monitor full of chameleons. I haven't actually seen it yet. So if you wouldn't mind opening it up, because I'm curious how this looks too. Because tuxedo now is selling open Susan laptops. And this is the first one with a nice customized screen that I've seen. And it's all incredibly well packed. There we go. Whoa. I didn't see it.
 Right.  Yeah, thanks everybody for coming.  This is the fun part of, well, fun.  Hopefully, everybody's having fun at the whole conference.  Yeah, so the regular annual sort of conference board meeting.  Last year, we had a whole bunch of topics and we kind of rambled on about all of them  for the better part of an hour and then had questions at the end.  This one is a little bit different because if you've been kind of keeping up with the  mailing lists, there's pretty much only one topic that's on the board's mind at the moment,  this idea of a foundation or some legal structure.  And, yeah, we're going to be talking about this now.  And please, if you have any thoughts, comments, questions as we go along, the microphone at  the end is always open and we can kind of just work our way through it as we go.  And Axel, I think we said you would start explaining what we're thinking and why we're  doing this.  So over to you now.  Yeah, we'll do.  Thank you, Rich.  Yeah, welcome everybody to the board meeting, to the question and answer session, ask the  board.  As Richard already mentioned, we spent a lot of time this year in investigating whether  we need a legal structure and if we need one, what would be the ideal one.  So to spend some words upfront, I mean, we all know Zuzan Open Zuzan have common roots,  history and values.  So we are basically sharing the genetics and we're also sharing the logo for the most part.  And I think this is a great benefit, a win-win situation for both of us, which we definitely  want to keep.  So everything that we're doing here is not to separate us from Zuzan.  It is to gain more flexibility for the Open Zuzan community.  What we've noticed in organizing the last conferences but as well in sponsoring other  projects or receiving money from sponsors, it is an issue that the Open Zuzan community  has no legal entity behind it.  And if there is a company, for example, that wants to sponsor us or we as a community think  this project is beneficial and we want to donate some money for it, we just can't do  it at the moment.  Just for legal and as well for tax reasons.  So the idea is now let's put a legal structure in behind of Open Zuzan.  And just to kind of add a little bit of extra context from the Zuzan side.  Zuzan is keen and always trying to help Open Zuzan in these kind of things, like taking  sponsorship like arranging hardware and providing services, but just with the nature of the  fact it is a company, when dealing with other companies, suddenly things like donations  become way more complicated because an external company might not want to give Zuzan a huge  chunk of money and dealing with things like invoices and taxes with the lack of an Open  Zuzan legal entity gets complicated with that.  So it's not a case of Zuzan doesn't want to help with that, but just because of the  nature of the organization that it is, it can't.  So yeah, I think the motivations we have already mentioned partnering with organizations  out of Zuzan, receiving donations, being able to give donations as well to other projects.  And so also what Richard mentioned in case we need some additional hardware, some services,  something like that, we could easily sign a contract with another company to provide  us this service, even if it's on a free basis for us so that they are charging their e-forces  and getting a kind of a donation received from our end.  All this is currently not possible.  So we have investigated various options, various legal options.  What could they be?  First of all, a so-called foundation in German, a Stiftung.  This is a model under different legal or local legal legislations.  What was that the right word?  I don't know.  I'm not a lawyer.  That other projects like, for example, the Document Foundation who's driving the development  of Libra Office have chosen.  A German one is the so-called EV, an eingetragener Verein.  We've translated this now with an association.  This is a fairly simple thing to set up.  You just need seven people.  You pull a template from a website, from the court website, fill it in, go to court and  get registered.  Another option could be an umbrella organization.  That means we are joining an organization like what are they called, Rich, SPF or something  like that?  SPI or the Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation.  These umbrellas that exist either help provide these kind of services for open source projects  or be home for them more legally.  Right.  Yeah.  Thanks.  In that case, the umbrella organization would sign the contracts and receive a fee from  us.  For example, I don't know what that charging 10% of the donations or whatever.  Option four, we keep it as it is, which is of course not the intention that we're having.  To make a very, very long discussion short, the proposal of the board is the SoCOND Foundation.  The reason for this is the foundation based on its setup, on its rules, is much, much  more stable like the EV, like the eingetragener Verein.  In the worst case, just a construction, but not far from reality.  We get a bunch of new members into the EV and they are suddenly changing the purpose  of OpenSUSE from providing a community and developing a distribution to selling t-shirts  or whatever.  And if they can get a qualified majority, they can do that.  And then OpenSUSE as such is gone.  And this is something that we strictly want to avoid.  We want to get some legal independence, but we want to make sure that the structure of  OpenSUSE and the purpose of it as a non-profit organization dealing with free software keeps  persistent.  And the ideal legal form that we could found up to now is the foundation.  And from the SUSE side of things, one of the unique aspects when talking to SUSE about  this is, of course, like we said at the beginning, keeping that closeness and that relationship  is a key part, both from the community and the board's motivations, but also from SUSE's.  And looking at how other projects have done this, there's lots of OpenSUSE projects out  there that have an EV.  And sometimes they have some of these problems with influence, sometimes they don't.  But no one really has built a foundation or built an EV in the open source world in the  circumstances that we're doing this.  Normally it's a case of a project starting from the ground up and they need some legal  entity just so they can exist.  Or they're forming their foundation or their EV in response to a nasty situation with their  previous corporate sponsor.  And therefore the foundation is some lifeboat of independence to get away from the nasty  corporate entity.  The one of the things we have here is we want to stay close with SUSE.  SUSE wants to stay close with OpenSUSE.  But we want the foundation for the purposes we've been talking about.  How do you model that?  How do we structure that?  So the foundation is solid and stable in its own right and solid and stable with its relationship  with SUSE.  Basically, can we use this foundation approach to codify into law the weird and wonderful  and unique relationship we have with SUSE?  And that's where we're investigating now and why we've chosen this route compared to  the others where the legal framework might be looser and therefore actually harder to  pin down the key parts we want to keep.  So one of the main benefits of a foundation over an EV, for example, is we can keep the  way the OpenSUSE board is founded.  We can keep the way membership works.  The organization of OpenSUSE, as it exists at the moment, can basically stay as it is  and will continue to be as it is.  But we now have a legal entity behind us to support that, which is, whereas if you go  for an EV, there is rules about how the board is made, how the members are made up, and  that's not necessarily what we're doing at the moment, which would be a big change.  Yeah, in terms of running both organizations, an EV as well as a foundation, they have similar  taxation and accounting rules, so we are not gaining a benefit from one or the other.  In terms of setup, the foundation is slightly more afford, but we can also take advantage  there from the experiences that, for example, the document foundation has already made.  So they have already been preparing the ground with German legal authorities to set up a  foundation for a free software project.  So my proposal is before we describe the potential next steps, what are your questions or remarks?  Anybody?  Hans?  Yeah, much closer.  Just to add to this question, I have, as you're probably aware, I've set up several foundations  and EVs in the cultural sector in the Netherlands, and my experience is also that if you indeed  have a very singular focus in mind, you want to do long term, and especially also in keeping  contractual relationship with upstream partners like Suzer, a foundation is much more stable.  What you see in the cultural sector is that the association model works for individual  artists working together, collaborating on certain projects, but you very rarely see  it for things like festival organizations or whatnot.  So I'm absolutely convinced for you that you've chosen the right type of entity.  I also think that if you look at associations as they are co-ordered in the, like the Drupal  Association, which is a governing board for the Drupal community, they are not actually  an association in the legal sense, they are a foundation.  And because they are a foundation, they can actually organize, receive sponsorships and  whatnot.  So just my two cents, I think you're doing the right thing.  And on a personal note, I'm very happy to finally see this materialized because I've  tried to sponsor Open Suzer conference before.  In 2013, I've managed to sponsor it.  Don't ask me how it works.  And then in 2015, I organized Open Suzer conference.  So don't ask me how it works.  But it's awesome to see you pushing this forward.  So compliments to the board.  Yeah, thanks Hans.  Other questions?  Anna.  You have said that at the moment it's not possible that we donate money to other organizations  and that is not true.  I mean, we are sponsoring at the moment many, many, many organizations, many conferences,  and we are doing it at the moment with Suzer's money.  And we are speaking about quite a lot of money.  And then my question is, in the moment we have the foundation, we will, you say Open  Suzer will be able to do these donations, I wonder with money.  I mean, is Suzer going to give us some, or give Open Suzer some budget?  Or how is it going to happen?  What's happened with travel support, for example?  So I guess the Open Suzer being able to give to other people, we already do.  But potentially, that always goes through Suzer.  So this would give the board the opportunity to go under these exceptional circumstances.  We want to give money to someone else where we haven't, without going through Suzer, which  we haven't done in the past.  But that's probably, of all the reasons we've given, the being able to give money to other  people is the far lesser reason than being able to receive money.  So I'll speak in with two hats on.  First is, current Open Suzer Treasurer.  We don't do a huge amount of sponsorships of other projects.  We regularly sponsor GNOME, KDE.  We have an arrangement with Fedora where we sponsor each other.  But it's not, if we want to sponsor a project, we still have to go through Suzer, get the  approvals.  And there are times where we would like to sponsor a project or a community or an event,  et cetera, that may be close to conflicting with Suzer, for whatever reason, being a company  with commercial requirements, et cetera.  They have much stricter sensibilities about some of these things, whereas as a community,  we are much more relaxed about those concerns.  So that's one aspect.  Yes, we do do sponsorship, but we could be better with the sponsorship that we're doing.  My other hat on is, as a sponsor of the Open Suzer conference, it's really complicated to  get the money to sponsor the conference.  So I've got budget.  I want to provide that budget to Open Suzer for the conference.  It's really complicated because if we just give it directly to Suzer, it has to go through  Suzer's accounting, et cetera, whatnot, and then it could quite easily and has done, long  go in the past, got lost in somebody's cost center, et cetera.  We have an arrangement at the moment for the It's of Open Suzer to be able to receive  the money for us who can then do something in return.  But that's not necessarily the best way of handling that money.  If we could provide that money directly to the Open Suzer project, the project can then  go, okay, this partner is very generous in their sponsorship donation.  We only need to use X amount for the conference.  We then have additional sponsorship funding that we can then procure either hardware or  we can put additional funds towards TSP, et cetera.  By doing a foundation, et cetera, it's actually beneficial for Suzer from a financial perspective.  Being a non-profit, et cetera, there are tax benefits, obviously.  So we're not saying that we don't want Suzer's money and we don't want Suzer to participate  in any aspect of the project.  We most certainly want them to participate and it's not about independence.  This is more about less dependence and somewhat more autonomy to make our own decisions to  do things, but still being able to keep that connection close.  I understand that it will be easy to operate, but still, any of you say answer my question,  where is the money coming from?  Because if we have no money, then we cannot donate anything.  Have we already spoken something with Suzer?  Will they give us some money?  Nothing is set in stone with any of this because it needs the agreement of the community, it  needs the agreement of Suzer.  We're at the stage now where we can talk about this and we've had discussions with Suzer  at this level.  The general ideas are along the lines of at least some of the budget that Suzer currently  has for sponsoring Open Suzer and the other stuff around that would almost certainly be  a regular donation to this foundation.  We don't have the numbers.  That's to be discussed and negotiated and figured out.  Given this model of doing everything we're currently doing plus the new stuff, we don't  necessarily need the numbers in the sense of we do okay now, we do sponsor stuff, we  make it work somehow.  Even if the foundation starts with pretty much zero, we learn our lessons that way,  we develop it over time, and then Suzer could end up finding, okay, well, now we can stop  worrying about all the conference nonsense and make it the foundation's problem.  The nice thing with this model is we can kind of organically grow it as we figure out how  it works from all sides.  Sorry.  I'm kind of excited to see how this is going to play out, but there's a couple of things  that I'm a little unclear about.  The first one is currently today with, for example, the Open Suzer Build service, there  is this list in the top right corner of all the sponsors and stuff.  I don't know exactly how that kind of arrangement thing is going, but have you guys thought about  how we could either make that a process that is a little bit more clear or obvious, or  how to preserve that relationship?  Because from what I understand, Suzer provides the overwhelming majority of those resources  there.  How would we make sure that we don't accidentally get into a situation where we're suddenly  starved of all the things, and those are the kinds of unpleasant things that nobody likes  to think about, but it's like you don't want to be put into that situation.  Okay.  I'll take it.  Yeah, with that kind of thing, the concerns of stuff that Suzer's currently providing,  like the Build service, is this going to scare them away?  This is, we've already started these discussions.  We had Thomas the Jack-O-Moe here on the first day of the conference.  He came out with the board for a dinner the night before the conference.  We basically gave him this presentation.  We basically had this discussion.  From Suzer's side, Suzer is committed to keeping Open Suzer on this footing.  It is right now, and helping it to expand.  These discussions are not scaring anybody at Suzer.  That's why we're doing them this way to make sure that doesn't happen.  With regards to the Build service, as somebody that has arranged donations to the Build service,  it's complicated having to go through the corporate structures, etc., because of the  legalese and all that sort of stuff.  Having a less dependent entity makes things much, much easier.  We can actually grow that sponsorship.  There are companies and willing sponsors who want to sponsor the project, but refuse to  deal with going through a corporate entity, because they don't trust Suzer.  They just want to make sure that 110% of that goes to the intended recipient, which is Open  Suzer.  For example, we have one sponsor, I can't remember exactly which one, where that was  the case.  You had all the usual negotiations about sponsorship and hardware transfer, and then because they  wanted to be absolutely sure that that hardware was being used by Open Suzer, additional contracts  had to be signed up.  This hardware is being transferred to Suzer Linux GNBH for the sole purposes of being  used by Open Suzer.  That gets complicated after all.  This really hopefully knocks some of that stuff down, so that stuff becomes easier for  all of us on Suzer side and on Open Suzer side.  Next question.  Yeah.  First of all, I think this is a good idea, because I was asking for it the last three  years already.  You can help anytime.  Yeah.  The thing is that actually, I guess, I don't worry a lot about money and a lot about the  donation thing because this unleaves a lot of potential, I guess.  The only thing I worry about or the only thing I would ask about is what will be the  actually continuity in working thing.  So how will the board be set up in future?  Will there be some legal thing of the foundation or not?  Like will there be some written thing, how the board will be set up?  Is there already a draft or not that we can read?  What will be the role of the share man in this?  Will this be still elected by Suzer or not?  Will we all become members of the Open Suzer foundation or not?  Are there rules?  Yeah, there are.  And so on.  This is an important thing for me.  You can trust me, there will not be only one page of Britain, probably 110 or something  like that.  At the moment, if you look at the Wiki page for Open Suzer, there is the existing rules  that we define how the board is elected.  There is the existing rules for how members or who can be a member that Richard needs  to put back there.  But basically the idea is without having gone through a lawyer yet, fundamentally we don't  want that structure to change.  The chairman will still be appointed by Suzer.  I didn't ask for that by the way.  No.  The board will still be voted by the members in the same way it is now.  These rules have a current clause that we can have a vote and half the members can change  those rules.  So if it comes to a point in the future where we think the members think that should be  changed, they'll be free to vote on that and change that structure.  But we're not planning on changing that in a drastic way.  To give you an idea about the next steps that we currently foresee, probably not complete.  First of all, this discussion will start it again or continue it on the Open Suzer project  mailing list.  At a certain point in time then we will have a vote of the members whether they agree to  go to a foundation structure.  And then if we have a qualified majority, then we will kick off the next step.  That means for example that we sit together with lawyers, with experts to discuss how  the charter of the foundation should look like.  And this charter will be phrased in that way that our position as NGO for free software  will be more or less carved in stone.  As Simon already said, we will try to keep the rest as it is.  And as soon as we then have the foundation set up, the current members of the Open Suzer  project can opt in to go into this foundation.  For legal reasons we cannot force you to go over there.  But you receive a mail and say, yeah, I want to go for the Open Suzer foundation.  And then your membership is transferred one by one into the Open Suzer foundation.  In parallel to that on the mailing list, I will be talking to Suzer about getting their  support for helping logistically things like assigning budgets to help us, for example,  maybe fund a lawyer.  So we have legal advice for this, separate from Suzer's lawyers.  So there's no conflict of interest there.  After the charter, of course, almost certainly we'll have a second membership vote of actually  accepting the charter.  So the community is going to be deciding the absolute fate on this.  But that's the current where we are today.  Next question.  So you've explained why a foundation rather than an EV and that all makes total sense.  What about an umbrella organization like LAF or SPI?  Is that any...  So for the vast majority of them, we are too big and we'll create too much work so they  don't want to.  They all charge around a 10% fee.  And so we can probably, with the amount of money coming through, we would instead be  able to use that money to fund someone or ask Suzer nicely to fund someone to do the  management for us.  So the board doesn't expect to have to sit down and run the foundation doing all the  explicit work.  And to kind of give a personal add-on, I mean, I was personally quite fond of, even with  those things, quite fond of looking at like SPI, because it's what the Debian are using,  for example, for an arch.  And SPI is a 503C charity in the States.  And in Europe, because of course, lots of us are in Europe here, they have a chapter,  a friendly association of ffi.ev, who basically do the same things, take money, they work  together.  Looking at this recently, we've suddenly realized like SPI and FFI aren't really talking to  each other anymore.  And that kind of thing makes you realize, okay, jumping from a situation of a good working  relationship with one entity to then being totally dependent on another, which you don't  have as good a relationship with the other.  So let's kind of push this a little bit towards the foundation idea.  We can build something here that is rock solid on like every side of the aspect.  So I also applaud this decision.  I think foundation is a good way to go.  However, there is some caveat.  And I was on a board of an organization which used to be a foundation, lots more than Open  Sews, of course, that was the XORC Foundation, which eventually ended up under the umbrella  of SPI for a very simple reason.  The board was constantly struggling because we didn't have access to legal counsel, unless  we of course paid a lawyer.  We didn't have access to accounting, so it was always a struggle to file taxes.  International money transfer was really difficult.  We didn't, sometimes we didn't know how to do this, and all of these things got resolved  by going under an umbrella because they had all these services and knew how to do all  these things.  So maybe this is not an issue here.  And I certainly think that it's a better solution than an umbrella as well.  So one of the conditions that the board has put fairly firmly on going forward in this  way is to partner with SUSE for them to provide us with someone who can help us do the accounting  side, do the legal side.  We haven't obviously looked at the specifics of what that will look like yet, but one of  the key points is we would like someone, we would like either SUSE to fund Open SUSE  to the level that Open SUSE can employ someone to do that, or SUSE or employ someone on Open  SUSE's behalf to take care of those things so that it is not something that the project  has to worry about.  SUSE has quite a commitment to providing Open SUSE with everything they need.  They haven't changed that commitment.  That commitment is still ongoing.  And as we've discussed this with SUSE, we've seen this is just an extent, that sort of  role as an extension of that commitment to provide Open SUSE with everything it needs.  I have a question that's logistic of the money is understandable, but what about the people?  I mean, that's the people that's working in SUSE supporting the project, etc.  If there are any case that Open SUSE then we'll start to hire the people to work on  their priorities because they think that this or that project should go this way and SUSE  think differently.  Will there be some separation in this manner or not?  That's a good question.  I'll let Andrew answer it.  So there's an example of where Open SUSE has gone in a different direction to where SUSE  is going and that's cubic.  Okay, so you've got cast from SUSE.  An episode of us from 300 Bus.  Open SUSE went down the cubic route, SUSE went down the cast route and they're quite divergent.  And that's a healthy competition, if you will.  It's just like if you're two siblings, two brothers, two sisters, whatever, there's always  an element of competition trying to be better than the other one, but at the end of the  day you're still part of a family and you come to an agreement ultimately at the end  of the day, one shape or another.  I think for me this approach isn't, as I mentioned, it's not about independence.  It's about enhancing the existing relationship, giving us a little bit more flexibility.  As an example in the past when the Document Foundation was founded, SUSE were a founding  member but due to commercial requirements and reasons they had to withdraw their seat.  Now we wanted to ensure that we kept that relationship with the TDF because it's close  to everyone's hearts, etc.  So we had to work on getting somebody from the open SUSE community to stand in and replace  the SUSE seat.  It's an example of where we have different views but we actually work together well.  So even though we're doing something differently to what SUSE is doing, it actually benefits  both of us.  So I think it's not something that the Board has actively discussed, being able to employ  people to do certain things.  If we ever got to the position where we had enough money though and a future Board wanted  to look at it, I think it's important that the structure we set up will therefore allow  that.  That's actually another reason why some of the umbrella organisations don't work because  they make it very hard to employ people.  Putting my SUSE Chairman hat on now, one of the first concerns raised by senior management  SUSE as we discussed this, this all sounds really good, but SUSE wants to make sure that  whatever opens SUSE creates there, it's always going to be open for SUSE to be able to contribute  to.  That's going to be one of the things that we've already agreed.  We all want that.  So we don't necessarily know how we're going to reflect that into the charter of the Foundation,  but that's definitely something that we aim to have reflected in the charter of the Foundation.  So whatever happens, the open SUSE project is always there for SUSE to contribute to  and be part of, and there will always be a healthy working relationship with that.  I would like to ask about what for me is the most important aspect of the Foundation that  I haven't heard yet.  What happened with transparency?  Is it going open SUSE to make public what we are spending the money on if we have a Foundation?  When I say make public, I mean publishing who we are giving money to, the amount, the  date, so completely public?  Without having the legal advice, what I would say is that the intention certainly is to  be completely transparent.  There may be areas where some funding or some line items can't be reported for legal issues,  but as an example, we could show what's being spent on staffing.  If we have to employ a secretary or something like that for those things, then yes, that  would be shown on the accounting.  We can show, like I say, this is all without legal verification.  I don't see an issue with showing how much is being spent on TSP, how much is being spent  on sponsorships, but it's still needing to be discussed and verified.  I'm going to give my personal view anyway.  One of the things I'm really excited with this is the ability to make a lot of this  stuff which we just can't make transparent now, way more transparent.  If you look at the examples out there, how KDEV do it, which is somewhat narrow, you  see the big bins of what KDEV is spending, but not more compared to the TDF, where it's  a little bit more extensive.  I would personally want to lead to more the TDF's example of really pushing the transparency  as far as we can at legal advice permit it.  So not exactly legal advice here, but in the Netherlands we have a special tax exemption  status for foundation.  It's a foundation for doing, let's say, useful projects in communities.  They have very clear rules and regulations about what you must report on in your annual  papers.  It's pretty much as transparent as you can get it.  So if the foundation open-suser is aspiring for once to have that kind of tax breaks, then  you automatically end up being quite transparent in basically anything.  There are certain areas, at least in the Netherlands, in which you can avoid having to name sponsors  by name if a sponsor doesn't want that.  So then you have to address this to the tax service directly, then you don't have to publish  the name of the sponsor in your annual reports, but you have to inform the tax authorities  on that procedure.  So by definition, this will be much more transparent than it ever can be when integrated in a company,  and there's rules for that.  Of course I was not speaking about the things that are illegal.  I mean, if you cannot publish something, you cannot.  But for example, saying how much money you spend in conferences, I mean, that you tell  me you spend 10,000 euros in conferences, say me absolutely nothing.  And I don't think it will be legal to say what conference and how much amount of money  we are giving every conference we spend.  So I think that is the kind of transparency I was speaking about.  I mean, of course, you employ a secretary.  I don't want that you tell me the name.  I don't need that.  I don't want that we are spending that amount of money on personnel.  Let me share the example of the TDF.  All the ledgers are published.  Obviously, there are some numbers that are aggregated because you can't share how much  you are paying a particular employer, for example, but everything is available.  You can go on the website, on the foundation section of the website, and you can download  the ledgers.  And then you can see how much is spent for the conference, for the annual conference,  how many donations the foundation is receiving.  So you can obviously see everything.  And if you have time, you can also do the maths and at the end understand where the money  are going.  In any case, if you don't want to deal with the spreadsheet or if you are not an expert  in budget, and it's not something really immediate to understand and to read, for example, TDF  is producing an annual report with all the details about the activities done by the community  and there is also the financial part that describes how the donations are spent, which  are the plans for the next year.  So you can have everything.  Obviously, we need to discuss the details for the OpenSource Foundation, but the Document  Foundation is a foundation that is a German one in Berlin, so probably will be something  similar.  But that it is possible to do, I'm pretty sure.  So my question is, is OpenSource going this direction or try to make public everything  that is possible?  Yeah, absolutely.  This one is the idea.  Obviously, I'm not a legal, but I'm the chairperson for TDF, so I saw the details on that side  of the foundation and I can answer that it's possible.  So why not to go on this direction?  This one is the idea.  A good bit of experience, I guess.  I've been involved in running Linux ConfAU in Australia one year and that's put on by  Linux Australia, which is an incorporated association in Australia, which tries to be  as transparent as possible about all things.  And so LA will publish figures for how much it spends when it runs conferences.  It gives community grants to people.  It will say how much we spend on grants and things and it will be as transparent as it  can be about all those things.  So all of that gets released somehow.  But where it gets tricky is money received as sponsorship for conferences that it runs  because if you've got, say, Red Hat and Suzer and Ubuntu all sponsoring the same conference  and all appearing at the same level of sponsor, they may actually have paid slightly different  amounts of money each depending on exactly what they negotiated with who was running  sponsor liaison.  And so the organisation can't say individually how much each sponsor of a given level contributed  or we would piss off our sponsors.  But we can say as a whole how much was received.  So I don't know if that's sort of an example of the sort of tricky things you can have  with wanting complete transparency but not, you know, being able to get as close as you  can if you like.  Next question from anybody?  Comments?  Feedback?  No?  Yes?  No?  Okay.  So what do we have next?  One thing I would like to point out is that we as a board are presenting this idea but  we need all of you.  I've been around for 15 years in the Suzer and Open Suzer communities and I've seen  this discussion before and not just a single time.  And the last times it didn't work because, mainly because we as a community did not step  up and do things.  It can't be done by the board on its own.  We need your input.  We need your feedback.  So please help out if this community is dear to your heart.  Yep.  And yeah, that's it.  Thank you very much.  Christian has, Christian always has some more things.  One last thing in the board meeting, so I had a bet with the board like do you manage  to send out all the meeting minutes until the conference?  If I would have managed that, then yesterday you would have seen me with a green hat so  that you have something to laugh about me.  And then I thought let's turn that bit around and we have exactly one person who has to  send out minutes from March.  Here's your hat.  Thank you very much.  It's his so pretty girl.  Yes.  Well, that's now up to you.  Thanks.  Okay.  So, all right.  Thanks for being here.  The next part is a giveaway of a tuxedo laptop.  So if you could put your hand underneath your chair, you might find a 3D printed Gecko.  Anybody?  There might, I mean it might be around you.  You can check.  It's a distraction.  Anybody?  Really?  I wonder if it dropped.  3D?  Well, I'll just see a mad rush.  It's somewhere in that area over there.  Kind of, kind of taped to the bottom right in the front.  Look at that.  There we go.  Come on up here.  Go ahead.  No, it's fine.  I don't know anything.  So this lovely gift is sponsored from tuxedo computers.  What model is it?  Oh, okay.  It's a brand spanking new 15 inch laptop from tuxedo with a customized back monitor  full of chameleons.  I haven't actually seen it yet.  So if you wouldn't mind opening it up, because I'm curious how this looks too.  Because tuxedo now is selling open Susan laptops.  And this is the first one with a nice customized screen that I've seen.  And it's all incredibly well packed.  There we go.  Whoa.  I didn't see it.
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