Quoting Kevin P. Fleming (kevin+...@km6g.us): > I have quite a bit of experience in this area and can state that none > of this would be necessary (and some are not even options). CDCK does > not request or hold rights to any content on the Discourse sites they > host. I have no doubt they would happily offer an instance to OSI and > allow OSI to set the content policies, terms of service, and content > license.
I appreciate your speaking, Kevin. I continue to be curious about whether users would be expected to enter a contractual relationship with Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. (CDCK), in order to participate. I'm not at all suggesting that there is anything specifically unsavoury about CDCK, but I've encountered two similar situations. One is the system administrator guild BayLISA, a 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation of which I was a Board member and corporate officer for a decade and a half, and which holds monthly lecture meetings open to the public. During my last couple of terms on the Board, a strong Board majority elected to outsource practically all of BayLISA's Internet presence to Meetup.com (Meetup, Inc.), and require meeting attendees to RSVP via Meetup -- agreeing to Meetup, Inc., contract terms, their data-mining, etc. I politely made clear that I considered this bad policy for a number of reasons, including conveying a lack of competence by system administrators to host Internet operations _and_ it being inappropriate to require BayLISA meeting attendees to enter a contractual relationship with an NYC for-profit corporation, but didn't push matters to Board votes because I'd evidently be outvoted. I sat for one more two-year term hoping this policy would be reversed, but it wasn't. After I left the Board, the new Board accidentally broke BayLISA's Mailman mailing lists and didn't fix them, and also turned the front page of http://www.baylisa.org/ into an HTTP 301 redirect to Meetup. Because I felt obliged to set policy about Meetup events for my BALE (Bay Area Linux Events) technical events calendar anyway, I addressed BayLISA as an object lesson in my Meetup policy page for BALE http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/meetup.html : Let's say you are interested in BayLISA, the San Francisco Bay Area's guild of system administrators (and non-profit corporation), that I used to help run as Secretary, Treasurer, and Board Member for almost two decades. You seek BayLISA out, and the first thing you read is that, if you wish to attend BayLISA meetings, you must first RSVP for each such meeting via Meetup.com, which means you must enter an ongoing contractual business relationship with Meetup, Inc. (register a login), and create your BayLISA RSVP entirely via the Meetup.com Web site rather than on BayLISA's own site (whereby the Meetup, Inc. firm is certainly logging detailed tracking information about your Web activity, which data then becomes part of the data-mining product it sells to others). So, as a BayLISA attendee, you should be wondering: Why am I suddenly dealing with — and entering into a contractual business relationship with — these clowns in NYC at all? Wasn't I just trying to attend a local meeting of sysadmins? And well you should wonder: I was on BayLISA's Board of Directors for about a decade and a half. My last two terms of office were marred by the Board majority's sudden (and then ongoing) mania for outsourcing of the guild's entire Internet operations to Meetup, Inc. — as if we, as Unix system administrators, were no longer competent to run Web sites and mailing lists — and by late 2013 I was so extremely disaffected by this ignominious trend that I declined to serve any more terms of office, and let my (always paid — unlike the other Directors) BayLISA membership lapse. Why on earth should you need to maintain a separate business agreement with an NYC-based commercial company, just to attend meetings of your local sysadmin guild? It's absurd. And I would maintain that it's particularly shameful for system administrators or Linux, BSD, and other open-source software groups to impose these outsourcing requirements onto attendees, as if Internet operations were not their own core competency. Around the same time, one staffer at Linux Documentation Project, for which I maintain a HOWTO and a FAQ, decided to migrate LDP's version-control repository from its own hosting to GitHub, operated by San Francisco for-profit corporation GitHub, Inc. Soon thereafter, LDP's established submission path for documents' SGML source code via e-mail silently broke, which fact I inferred after LDP failed to pick up three of my HOWTO revisions in a row. Upon inquiring, I was told 'Oh, sorry, you'll want to do a GitHub pull request.' I said this would require me to enter a contractual relationship with GitHub, Inc., which I would rather not, and that I just wanted to upload some SGML, fellahs. After some discussion, the latest revision of my HOWTO got entered into GitHub by a helpful third party, but in effect my HOWTO has now forked from LDP, and I'm pretty sure many other HOWTO maintainers are doing the same. We didn't seek a contractual agreement with some corporation in NYC; we just wanted to participate with LDP. So, I am curious: To participate with OSI on a hope-for CDCK-hosted, outsourced Discourse instance, would contributors need to enter into a contractual relationship with for-profit corporation CDCK? (I cannot help notice Luis replied to the other part of my comment, but not that bit.) -- Cheers, "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC). Step back Rick Moen from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet r...@linuxmafia.com they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating McQ! (4x80) the civilization you inherited." -- David Brin _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
