[Mageia-discuss] A suggestion regarding community organization.

[Romain d'Alverny]

Hi Gamaliel,

2010/9/22 Gamaliel Lamboy Rodríguez <gamalamboy at gmail.com>:
> I was truly impressed by your efforts to fork Mandriva Linux into a full
> community-based operating system, and I fully advocate it.

Thanks! :-)

(hum, and yes, this is a late answer to your mail, nonetheless it's an
important topic to raise for the project)

> Regarding the future plans, I was thinking that you could consider becoming
> a cooperative, since it upholds most of the values behind free software by
> itself, is a community enterprise, and -being an established movement- has
> an enormous amount of financial resources available to its development. It
> is offered simply a means to fund the community, not a community in itself.

Well, its resources for its development depends on its revenue; so it
makes sense to fund the project's community if it gets something from
the project that it can value and sell in some way and make a profit
from it.

> 4 - it is a nonprofit organization by its own structure.

Well, it can be a for-profit too (profit redistribution following
specific rules).

> My idea is that we create a software cooperative that is dedicated to
> funding Mageia Linux through various digital and cooperative means. The
> cooperative would contribute to Mageia, and Mageia would contribute back to
> the community. That's the general plan, but I can make more specific
> statements and answers to queries if needed/wanted.

If you have plans locally that make (business & technology) sense to
start such a structure, and you want to do it, do it. :)

We might consider to build something to help in this regard from
Mageia point of view (doc, howto, contacts at least) if it makes
sense, but I guess this is rather too new/young for now.

> Anyway, the most important thing is, it's a means to help the entire Linux
> community grow. The definition of cooperative says much more than my
> blabbering: "A co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united
> voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and
> aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled
> enterprise." It's close enough to what you guys are doing.

It's close to that, yes. Actually, some discussed the option to have
such a structure first (before the announcement), but it was preferred
to keep it small, flexible and simple for a start (project
coordinated/backed by an association with no employee) and to
encourage for-profits (among others) to participate into the project.

We have no specific plan about this yet (first major goal is to have
our release process up and done). Who knows, maybe the association
will have the means or the strategy to grow and employ people or to
fund a separate for-profit entity - that's fun & tricky but that's not
the focus for now anyway.

Cheers!

Romain