[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

[Tim Starling]

On 15/08/11 16:30, David Gerard wrote:
> 2011/8/15 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
>> It's not just financial collapse.  When Sun was acquired by Oracle and
>> they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork
>> the project - take the codebase and run with it.  It's not that easy
>> for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or
>> else the Foundation has too much power over the content community.
>> Let me make it clear that I currently am happy with the Foundation,
>> and don't see a fork as necessary.  If the community has a problem
>> with the board at any point, we can elect a new one.  If things
>> change, however, and it becomes clear that the project is being
>> jeopardised by the management, we need a plan C.
> 
> 
> Pretty much. It's not urgent - I do understand we're chronically
> underresourced - but I think it's fairly obvious it's a Right Thing,
> and at the very least something to keep in the back of one's mind.

So you're worried about a policy change? What sort of policy change
specifically would necessitate forking the project? Is there any such
policy change which could plausibly be implemented by the Foundation
while it remains a charity?

I'm just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of
resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the
risk.

-- Tim Starling