[kde-usa] Helping the Board with their NPO decision

[Jeff Mitchell]

Hi,

As I've said, I think the main question that needs to be sorted out is
whether paying the extra fees to the SFC is worth it in order to get
some of its extra patent indemnification protections. By the way, it's
rather euphemistically called "Some Personal Liability Protection":

<quote>
Some Personal Liability Protection

When a project joins Conservancy, it formally becomes part of the
Conservancy. (The project is thus somewhat analogous to a division of a
company or a department in a large agency.) As such, project leaders
benefit from some amount of protection from personal liability for their
work on the project.
</quote>

It's not true indemnification, it just means that the resources of the
Conservancy are behind you if you get sued as an individual. This is a
roundabout way of saying that it would be helpful to get the *exact*
details of what they provide (for instance, they say "project leaders"
above, but during in-person talks with Brad I was led to believe it was
all developers on the project). So that can be a tasker for myself or
Claudia to pull out of Brad Kuhn.

Anyways, I think that what might be truly useful to the board is to
actually get some feedback from North American developers. Those of us
that live here probably have very different perspectives about patents
and patent threats than those that don't. (For the record, I'm of two
minds about it myself...I definitely see both sides of going with one or
the other. So I understand that it's quite hard to make a decision for
the whole project.)

So here's what I propose: a survey, either sent out as forms to fill in
(SurveyMonkey or the like), or conducted via one-on-one chats (phone,
IM, IRC) to North American KDE developers. The survey would lay out the
choice facing a N.A. KDE NPO: provide some degree of patent
indemnification, but at a measurable and potentially significant
financial cost to the project; or, use that money for other purposes
(travel to conferences for N.A. contributors, e.g.). I think that the
trend would be quite interesting to see, and may prove to be very
beneficial to the Board in finding out, essentially, how their
constituents wish to be "ruled" :-)

This isn't necessarily an easy thing to do. Here are a few things off
the bat that I can think of that are difficult:

1) Finding a good sampling of the KDE N.A. developer community. There's
not a lot of us, but we're also not well-organized. Sending to this
list, for example, would not at all be inclusive enough.

2) Making the questions provide enough accurate information. We'll have
to get the exact details of the indemnification ironed out (and the
exact final fee %) so that we can know exactly what the money would be
buying us.

3) Making such a survey/questionnaire be bias-free so that people can
make informed decisions without feeling like they're being asked to make
a politically/socially pressured decision one way or the other.

4) ??? I'm sure there are more things that would need to be done to do
this properly, I just don't have time to think of more right now...

I think that the information gleaned from such a survey could be quite
useful to the Board in helping them make what I'm sure is a very tough
decision.

I'm interested in hearing other peoples' thoughts on doing this. Also,
Lydia's and Claudia's, or other Board members if they want to pass it along.

--Jeff

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