Re: [Fenfire-dev] FFF Extraordinary Meeting

[Matti Katila]

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Benja Fallenstein wrote:
> I'll summarize the reason as I understood it in the meeting.
>
> Basically, an yhdistys needs to have an "ideological" purpose, and it
> must neither benefit its members financially nor be an organization
> whose purpose is merely to hold money or other belongings or move them
> around. The board of patents and registration felt that our yhdistys
> would violate the latter requirement (i.e., be a "financial"
> organization). Ibid thinks that this is because our ideological
> message wasn't understandable in the previous draft except perhaps by
> free software hackers. :-)
>
> > To add more fuel to discussion I add here link to current constitution
> > (http://fenfire.org/foundation/fff-hyv-saannot.txt)
> > and to a new draft by Antti-Juhani
> > (http://kaijanaho.info/tmp/fff-saantoluonnos-2.utf8.txt).
>
> So ibid's proposal basically says,
>
> - the products of research should be available to the public as free
> software (short explanation of what free software is);
> - we are an organization doing research and all resulting software
> will be available under free software licenses.
>
> I wasn't sure about this because I felt that we are more *hackers*
> than *researchers* -- i.e. more concerned with writing useful and
> elegant programs than with whether we are discovering something *new*
> that nobody has even thought of before.

I feel the same. I think the word research needs to be removed.
It would be also nice that anyone who can turn on a computer can also
understand what's the purpose of the association.


> Okay, let me try whether I can summarize the ideas I think we should
> put in the constitution.
>
> - Software should be free.
> - The purpose of this organization is to develop Fenfire, which aims
> to be a new basic infrastructure for computing. For basic
> infrastructure, it's even more important that it's free.
> - All software released by this organization will be under a free license.
> - Recognizing that there is non-free software in our world, too, the
> association may also license its code to developers of non-free
> software, so that non-free software can run on the Fenfire system,
> too. (However, all code published by the association will also be
> available as Free Software.)

It's kind of heavy to say that aim is to be a new basic infrastructure :)
But yes anyway, who would say that isn't the aim? :)

> I don't know whether we can find a good formulation for this, but I
> think this is what I'd like the constitution to say, essentially. How
> do you others feel about this -- is this the right direction to try?

I don't think that we need to have in the constitution: "software
needs to be free" aiming that the association is to "translate" every
peace of software to free ones. Altough it would be nice if we can say
between the lines that one part of the association's ideology is free
software.


   -Matti