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

[Fred Bauder]

> 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

That technical staff have effective power to decide whether a fork is
justified is reason enough.

Fred Bauder