[Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

Sat Jul 29 22:21:29 UTC 2006

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>mboverload wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>>
>>I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
>>the immediate foundation.  A company that leases servers may easily give in
>>to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
>>advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
>>we would be giving up.
>>
>>    
>>
>Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit 
>leasing company.  Many of them would certainly give cause to your 
>discomfort.  A totally new company established for the purpose of 
>leasing back the hardware would do just fine.  Whatever contractual 
>arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a 
>break even business plan.
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
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>
Considering the efforts that WMF is putting into operating correctly in 
full compliance with Florida and Federal U.S. law; I find it hard to 
believe that our potential legal liabilities are large enough to justify 
complicating our community/corporate structure.

To casual reviewers considering donation this type of thing could look 
like an attempt to siphon money out of the WMF or raise questions why we 
feel it is necessary.

Consider the absolute worst case, litigation goes against us and WMF is 
forced to liquidate all  assets and cease operations.

The major asset of the project/program/community/foundation is the 
FDL'ed databases, GPL'ed software, and community of contributors, 
developers, and other volunteers.

A new Foundation could be back up and operating at current levels within 
a quarter or two with an aggressive public funding drive for hardware.

If the legal risks are really so high, perhaps we should seek a 
partnership or understanding with a major university such as Oxford, or 
Yale, or _______ that in the event of legal catastrophe the site could 
be brought back up on their servers until the community had organized a 
new nonprofit to host its projects and acquired and setup new servers 
and bandwidth.

Perhaps the Electronic Frontiers Foundation or SourceForge would be 
interested in some kind of reciprocal agreement?

regards,
lazyquasar