[Mageia-discuss] Financial questions

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 21:38 -0400, Pierre Pmithrandir a écrit :
> Hello
> 
> My question is quite simple. 
> In the list of contributors, we can see a lot of former mandriva
> employee name.
> They were employed by mandriva(or edge it) to create a distro.

No mostly edge-it. Mandriva people are still employed.

>  Now, they have no job, so a lot of time, and they would like to
> continue this adventure. I can understand it. 
> I have some questions about that : 
>  - Is it legal for you, have you some right to work in the same field
> than your previous employer ? Lot of contract have a clause to forbid
> that. It would be a very bad news if mandriva asked some question
> about that and stop the project.

They cannot prevent this. In order to have a non-concurrence clause in
France, it need to be 

1) limited in time
2) limited in scope
3) limited geographically
4) paid
5) and realistic

Ie, you can tell "I give you 30% of your pay each month so you do not do
work in the firewalling domain for 1 year in paris, Lyon and
Lille" ( real clause that was offered to a friend of mine ).

You cannot say "I give you 1 euro so you never work in computer field
for the rest of your life anywhere on the planet".

Oh, and of course, since Edge-it disappeared, there is no one to pay
anything to forbid anything, hence no issue with such clause.

>  - Have you some financial plan to survive. Now you have maybe some
> money from government, and again a lot of time, but if you find a job,
> how many time would you take for the distro. 

Well, I cannot tell the details for them, but they do have plans, yes.
And for the non ex-employee, I guess most of us have regular jobs.

>  - People seems to think that Mageia would never have employees, is
> that true ? Could you imagine to create a structure and month after
> month, hire the main contributors to prevent Mageia to be out of
> developer soon ?

Technically, a association can have employees. Bigger one does, for
administrative task first, and various task later. Regarding the hiring
of main developers, I must remind that most of them already have a job
( ie, all of the external mandriva contributers ).

What a french association cannot be is for profit ( except in
Alsace/Moselle, where the law is different, seek 'association loi 1910'
on the web if you speak french and if you are interested ). 

>  - You seems to think that it will be a free distro, but do you plan
> for some cashable services ? If a company ask your support, would you
> refuse and ask them to go to mandriva, or do you want to create
> something for that ?

As I said, there is various plans in the pipe, and yes, the distro will
be free. 

However, if a company ask for support, there is way that do not involve
anything , with stuff like "auto entreprenariat", or "portage
salarial" ( I do not know the details, you should consult a specialist
or do some research on the net if you wish to have more information,
this is the limit of my knowledge )

> Are you really motivated to do the same job than before, but without
> being paid ?  Are you ok to give this work for free to your previous
> employer(it's GPL...)

Again, I cannot answer for them, bu given the fact we usually give it
for free for people that may have moral values not really aligned with
ours, I think the question is already answered since the first day we
started to do free software.

> My questions are most about money, I know that is a subject that
> people love to forget, but I'm sure that it's a very important part
> when you want to create a budget, and I didn't get any information
> about that.

Well, maybe because the announce was like 3 days ago ? 

> By the way, a forum would be very nice to prevent our mailbox from
> quick die :-)

Well, a forum will just make zarb.org servers die ( where the website is
hosted at the moment, and where I am member of the admin team ), so do
not take this personally, but I prefer for the moment to make hotmail
suffer more than zarb.org :)

Not to mention that a forum will require some maintenance ( moderation,
spam cleaning, upgrade of the software when needed, watching it grow ),
and there is more urgent matter like having something to discuss before
having somewhere to discuss. We didn't really anticipated the rush of
people on the ml so we are trying to manage this properly while not
sacrificing proper hygiene and sleeping habits.

-- 
Michael Scherer