Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

the seventeenth effort:

HiFo or MCeV or whoever is
trustee
appointed by the
Beneficiary Maemo Community

The trustee (eventually) receives assets from Nokia who want those assets to become property of Maemo Community and hand it to the trustee for the sole purpose to handle it according to his role as community proxy.
The trustee received and holds donations from Maemo Community members which been bound to getting used for, and according to voiced interest of, Maemo Community at large, as well as particular donors.

The trustee is supposed to

• Carry out the expressed terms of the trust instrument
• Defend the trust
• Prudently invest trust assets
• Be impartial among beneficiaries
• Account for actions and keep beneficiaries informed
• Be loyal
• Not delegate
• Not profit; however, may charge fees for services to the Trust
• Not be in a conflict of interest position
• Administer in the best interest of the beneficiaries

It is quite obvious that the trustee is supposed to listen to any interest the Maemo Community voices, consider if it's legal, and in case there's no conflict with law, act accordingly, so to "administer in the best interest of the beneficiaries".

Particularly it's not up to trustee to ignore the beneficiary for an arbitrary period of time (like 6 months, one year) after appointment and act on own agenda not discussed with and acknowledged by beneficiary, since this is not a representative or indirect democracy, but rather a direct deliberative democracy if anything, with any entity like Council and HiFo serving to administrate and facilitate and execute decisions of community, but not decide or take own initiative and agenda.
It's also obviously not up to trustee to redefine the beneficiary.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Constructive debate of legal obstacles around HiFo and e.V. is distorted by discussion of personalities. If the topic was started by a programmer seeking to improve/re-invent a program, the programmer would have left the thread long ago.

Are you even reading the tags of the thread? :) I am ROFL!!!!!!

Does HiFo board have the right to terminate HiFo and have over its assets? And when will there be elections to MC e.V. board?

MC e.V. and HiFo co-existing was a possible model where the eV would be a Booster club only.

Who has to have access to the bank? All board members, all EU-resident board members, or the 3 board members signing at court?

A regular bank to have signers accepted EU-wide for an account with reasonable fees + charges would be brilliant. Not like there is a worldwide bank... Thank you, Chemist!

Council is not legally obligated to carry out the whims of the community, but it is obligated to consider the wishes of the community, and move in the same direction, as far as legally possible.

That's a bit of discrimination. As far as I know from "My Fair Lady", it is (some of) foreigners that can practice English to perfection; most native speakers have some kind of accent. When you attack a person for errors in English language, there is no need to carry the insult further by speaking about the speaker being not-native.

And thank you for writing about the controlled hand-off.

Thank you for the helpful clarification.

Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

close, it is not the trustee , but the legal entity that the the "trustee" is a trustee for that receives the assets.


again close - it is not " is it legal" that they consider, but "is it in the best interests of the entity (community in this case)"

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Quick line...
Are you telling me that "trustee" has right-and-obligation to do something illegal if it is deemed to be in the best interests of the community? And, who determines "best interests" - community or trustee?
Best wishes.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Tell me, how's trustee deciding that the interest of community is not in best interest of community? Patronizing?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Wikiwide, bizarre scenario but ok...

Before answering that i need to point out that i missed a link in the chain.

The trustee considers if it is in the best interests of the legal entity, the legal entity is there for the best interests of the entity (community).

If the trustee decides that something that is illegal is in the best interests of the legal entity they are a trustee for, then the legal entity is liable for the consequences, and in all honesty if you have sane laws then the legal consequences in their own right should make it not in their best interests. The trustee can also choose to step down.

Sadly this basic structure also applies ( although not in a legally enforceable sense ) in "outlaw originations", and your above statement is true.

The trustees that were voted in determines "best interests".

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

The electorate vote for the Representatives that they believe hold their views of what is in the best interests of the community*, that is what election campaigns and voting are all about.

this system is used because it is simply not practical to hold a referendum for every little thing, instead you choose a representative to "represent your views"


*entity, electorate

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

No, this is _not_ and never been a representative democracy. And there's no referendum needed for every little decision. Council is supposed to know what's happening in community, even asking if something is not obvious, and act accordingly in a responsive manner, I.E. during days. Referenda are basically only needed for changing the rules and for really severe decisions that can't get discussed and unanimously (with all participating community members) decided by council in e.g. the weekly meetings.
On a second thought there's basically nothing to decide at all, usually. "shall we do another coding contest?" sure go ahead! "will maemo council organize it?" probably not since not enough manpower, up to community members to do that. "will council support?" Sure thing, that's what council is made for. "shall we get more harddisks for servers?" ask techstaff, they will tell you if we need "will council buy them?" no, but council will tell HiFo that techstaff says servers need more harddisks and HiFo will (hopefully) buy them. "shall we rename talk.maemo.org into talk.jolla-community.org?" No, not technically feasible and makes no sense at all...

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

joerg_rw i pose you this question:

for council* how do they know what the electorate^ thinks is in the best interests of the electorate^?

*board, or any entity for that matter

^community, entity they represent

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

By listening to community and the intentions and interests that get voiced. And of course by applying simple common sense

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

The same way I quickly ignore all the posts (be it by you or by someone else) where a personal war is put on the table.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

again - unless these orders are illegal. Why is that not sufficient to cover BoD's asses?

I am not arguing whether there is a need for a legal entity. Sure, there must be one. Most probably it is my English, but I have no better :)

1. Turn Maemo (community) into a corporation, with GA on top and BoD(or whatever it is called in german) as executive body. In this scenario I don't see (or didn't get it) what exactly role has the community council. If GA is "the community" that tells BoD what to do, there is really no need for another entity doing the same. And how's that going to work legally. So maybe completely removing CC in this scenario is the sanest thing to do.


So, in (1) CC is completely removed, thus my question - how that benefits the community.

My bad for not putting quotes around "cashier". Sure those legal items you describe are implicitly included in the "cashier"'s role

This is something that should be well thought and I don't feel competent enough in the matter to have the answer ready, but I am sure one can find a way so the legal entity to have the means to stop illegal activity by techstaff or CC

again, we fall into "if not illegal" clause.

And I tend to disagree here - the type of people needed in the Board is not the same as for CC IMO. So the Board cannot be a replacement for CC.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

everyone, _please_ clearly mark your edits, in my view if you doing more that simple corrections you should make a new post - editing your post after it has been responded both makes you look undecided and makes keeping the responses both concise and relevant very difficult.

And how do they "listening to community and the intentions and interests that get voiced"?
of the things that get voiced how do they know what the community thinks is in the community's best interests?

note: joreg_rw's responce is a "what" not a "how", think " what is the goal, as opposed to "how it gets executed", but ill take it, it will just take longer to explain myself...

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

@freemangordon

my reasoning behind the stance of "in the best interest" as opposed to "is it illegal"
is to do with liability
first: legally the community is _not_ part of HiFo.
second: legally the board are the "controlling entity" and therefore have the most liability.

unfortunately without more research i cannot tell you the exact position of the council in regards to legal liability, but suffice to say their legal liability sits well below the board.

so if the HiFo board do something that the community council tells it too do on behalf of the community, they are responsible for that action, If that action leads to circumstances that the community dislikes, then the board are in a position were they are legally vulnerable and legal action could be taken against them, even though the original action was perfectly legal.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Sure, but AIUI it is the same even if there is no CC - they can always do something (like removing SDK images :) ), that the community dislikes. How's that different?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Correct, the board, being the legal entity, is 100% legally responsible. I said this before, and I repeat it here.
This is why it is important that the board (of eV) is indeed the upper mandate (power if you want) - since they are the ones risking legal actions - and yes, that could include prison or in 'best' case fines for for example copyright enfridgments.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

well consider this:
Nokia hold the distribution rights for the SDK images correct? ( some of the content can be freely distributed by itself due to its licensing but as whole package Nokia holds the rights)

Nokia have chosen ( or are forced to by a 3rd party ) not to allow HiFo those rights therefore its illegal to distribute that package.

how would a court case against someone who complied with a valid legal request to stop doing something, taken up by a party that was disadvantaged by the action that was legally forced be stopped end?

if the board did not take down the images Nokia could take legal action against the board. the board could be forced to pay damages( for example *) which would harm the community due the lack of funds to run the infrastructure.

OTOH if the board receives a formal request that the board believes it does not legally need to be complied with, it can at its discretion choose to ignore it if it concludes the potential threat of not complying is less harmful that the action needed for compliance.

*there are many ways this could play out, this is a simple example, action could be taken against HiFo or the board members themselves or both, depending on the circumstances.
(this paragraph has been edited to correct a spelling error, sorry :( )

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

And how you think that keeping Council benefits the Community? Especially, looking at Council's history?

The, we end up with exactly what we have now, and had for looong time - Board thinking that some decision is illegal and denying to do it, Council (or someone from Council) insisting that it's legal and pushing to do it = eternal conflict.

I will repeat myself - guys without legal responsibility can't decide on a rat's s**t thing, that require guys with legal responsibility to be done. It's insane, and won't EVER work.

Want to decide on something - take legal responsibility. Want to just volunteer to make Community better by talking with people, forwarding problems to legal entity, etc - do it, with or without ego-name of Councilor before your nick. But don't expect to have decisive power.

/Estel

Ps.

I'm unsure what "personal war" you're referring to - I quoted your post only, and answered to it. If you mean that I've written some examples of wrong doings of one "Councilor" that wanted too much power - sorry, but those are facts, not opinions.

Just like that fact that he threatened to delete Maemo's infra zillion times, and that he started to demand money for his doubtful service. Board VOTED on moving infra to other, free and reliable hosting, and got ACCUSED of doing "coup" and illegal things by said "Councilor".

If you deny others the right to write about such things and still being kept threatened as "serious discussion partners" by you, then you're not objective and try to pivot discussion to go along your personal sympathies/opinions.

Just like you were OK to write that chemist failed and sucked as CSSU-Stable maintainer (having good examples of why), everyone else is free to write that joerg failed, sucked, acted irrationally, and tries to grab power, then goes crybaby, when others took "toys" away from his hands.

/Estel

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

PROVE! Or rename to ESTEL_THE_LIAR
don't come up with quotes of other people saying similar ****, they probably just quoted you. Prove what I did, by quoting me
And for the smart*sses: I never provided any *own* service [except my free-of-charge_free-of-thanks 24/7 admin coordination], I announced that I will stop to PAY from own purse for service techstaff contracted with some provider, after careful evaluation that techstaff (and council) considred that service the right one, and it's not up to HiFo to overrule both entities, HiFo evidently lacks the competence, yet they not only overruled but actually bypassed council and parts of techstaff, and I've been told they more or less cheated the rest of techstaff into thinking they didn't do such rogue bypassing. THAT'S what I call a coup.
The only council member ever been heard of doing something rogue been YOU actually. No? What been that story with you "stepping down"?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Joerg_rw. Are you in or out of council?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

does that make any difference anymore?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

As others already stated and despite you claiming otherwise, Nokia clearly wanted those assets to become property of HiFo, a legal entity. IF they wanted those assets to become property of whatever usergroup, I believe they would have simply fully FOSS'ed it, In case you have other valid information, please quote.

I see no valid point in comparing or pointing to Trust law which is quite unrelated and would assume community being mentally incapacitated or something. Nevertheless, you mentioning it, displays the missunderunderstanding you're perceiving:
This simply does not apply. Since Nokia left,
WE ARE ONE PARTY ONLY!
You refusing to honour this circumstance is ...lacking words...

BTW, a community is a social unit of any size that shares common values, Nothing less, nothing more, but not a legal entity.

No, only your antithetical activity is! And no matter how hard you try to bend possible interpretations of what the structure should be in your imagination (as council never was what you're trying to carry it to), you're the driving force here since both, board and council, seem to agree at the major points.
Need opponents? - Fine, have your very own infra for that, but don't spill bad vibes here please.

If you're unable to comply to the real life situation, you're in the wrong position and therefore your membership in council will be revoked unless you resign yourself in a formally correct way within next 6 days. I'm already getting impatient with this, actually. :D

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

AYE MASTER! Err sorry, your HIGHNESS? Fuehrer? (now I get the 30pt "WE" in above post right, finally: pluralis majestatis)
does it need any more words to explain why I don't trust in THIS MCeV?
""improving democracy in maemo""[quote wn7mac] -- REALY NOW, EH??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...1JR-TgPfU#t=38

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Quick message....
1. Turn Maemo (community) into a corporation, with GA on top and BoD(or whatever it is called in german) as executive body. In this scenario I don't see (or didn't get it) what exactly role has the community council. If GA is "the community" that tells BoD what to do, there is really no need for another entity doing the same. And how's that going to work legally. So maybe completely removing CC in this scenario is the sanest thing to do.

GA are ordinary members of e.V., right? And do they need to disclose their full names, to join e.V.? Do they need to pay membership fee aka Mitgliedsbeitrag ?

If yes to all three questions, then GA is not going to include all members of maemo.org; only a small number, larger than Community Council but still a subset of maemo.org members. So, as far as I understand it, HiFo board is replaced by e.V. Board, and CC is replaced by GA; GA elects Board, and anybody can join CC.

Community members are not forced to be members of e.V. They can be registered on maemo.org without joining e.V. Right?
And there are other websites, such as my-maemo.com. Further splitting is not exactly helping, though I understand that having all eggs in one basket is not exactly safe.

[EDIT]
Where/when is/will be the web page for joining e.V.? For e.V. board elections?

Look forwards, not backwards. If HiFo board decided to hands everything over to e.V., no amount of arguing can force them to remain as HiFo.
[/EDIT]

Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

And nobody can save their as*es when somebody gonna sue them for embezzlement. That's why I declared I'm officially not part of all this and oppose the whole possibly illegal plan. (the much-bashed "veto").
For "possibly illegal" see:
The trustee's duties are: [...]
* Be impartial among beneficiaries
* Not delegate
* Carry out the expressed terms of the trust instrument

Nieldk said he's stepping down for same reason. I disagree on stepping down being the right answer. Opposing yes, bailing out no. I even suspect that stepping down doesn't change your liability.

on a sidenote: somebody suggesting trusts are only meant for, and used by, the mentally disabled is probably a member of that group. Prolly confusing trust with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardship
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_(law) "A party is a person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law." We clearly face at least two entities here: BoD and "community" (by whatever definition). The former has legal ownership, the latter is the one supposed to benefit from Nokia's "donation".
[intentionally with official signature]
-----[explicitly included to stay static-------------
Maemo Community Council member [2012-10, 2013-05, 2013-11, 2014-06 terms]
Hildon Foundation Council inaugural member.
MCe.V. foundation member

EX Hildon Foundation approved Maemo Administration Coordinator (stepped down due to bullying 2014-04-05)
aka "techstaff" - the guys who keep your infra running - Devotion to Duty http://xkcd.com/705/

IRC(freenode): DocScrutinizer*
First USB hostmode fanatic, father of H-E-N

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Better late than never. Actually, this was overdue/in order for so long, that I will believe it, when I see it. After that, we can, I hope, end the habit of turning every discussion about formalities into 2/3 content being joerg vs. board/joerg vs. world ping-pong.

It's becoming completely incomprehensible for average Maemo Community member, even if only by the sheer amount of useless text written (Board repeat the same over and over, joerg doesn't listen, lives in different reality, and tries to enforce his little inner world on others...). Heck, even I, knowing those thing from inside out have problems keeping up with this "informatory overdose".

Thinking about it, maybe such "chaos" where no one gets what it's all about, is what your (former, I hope) "Councilor" colleague is hoping for - a reality, where one jumping, shaking hands, and shouting louder (and having time for all this nonsense, waaaaay too much spare time, as it seems) can grab power/support of others.

/Estel

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Hardly. to stop me from posting what I think is the correct thing and not some "let's do it and f*ck the rules and laws" like you do, it would need to ban me from tmo as well, something that's more common to happen to you than to me ;-P. Maybe you missed it but (except last one) none of my posts been in from my role as council member. So what's your problem with me being council, eh? You will suffer me calling you a troll and liar even when council (or even HiFo or MCeV) goes so much out of their path to decide to exclude me from council (I'm only waiting for that to prove something. Some of the readers might know what i'm talking about)
I'm actually just laughing at you since I already gave up on maemo community (the truly great thing this been once), since you managed to ruin it. I'm just watching and providing material you can expose your true rotten mindset against. I got nothing to lose. I'm just offering my lawyers a way to earn truckloads of money from you when you spread lies about me that could damage my professional reputation (probably the quite reasonable reason for chemist to swiftly edit his post and delete his nonsense about me)

BR
jOERG
(private posting)

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Apparently I missed this. Sorry wicket, for the late reply.

I'm afraid that the source you're using has sacrificed conciseness for brevity. In an effort to not be "too long to read", they've chosen their wording poorly, giving a vague answer where a precise one is needed.

If you look at the wiki page for LGPL, and the terms themselves, it clearly states that there are several instances where LGPL code can be bundled into and with commercial products, and the resultant code does NOT need to be made public. It also states one can put copyright and other such restrictions on the resultant work, so long as it includes the proper text showing it contains LGPL libraries. See section 5 & 6 in particular for exact terms.

That is, in fact, the whole reason LGPL exists: To allow for commercial, non-public use of some parts of the Gnu project. You can read the FSF reasoning on why they created the LGPL here, and why they now advise against using it.

The part that requires you release source is if you modify the base library and want to re-distribute it as a separate thing. Then you have to supply code of the changes you made to the library for that purpose. Things like "plugin modules" (Karma), themes, forms, and code that interfaces with the library but are not part of it, are all exempt under LGPL.

Reality is that MidGard was put under LGPL for a reason, one which it's co-creator made very clear on the wiki page for MidGard itself. They placed it under LGPL so that they could turn around and create custom CM sites to sell to others without them having to worry about the legal ownership issues.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

fine, now you're on same page as rest of us. It simply doesn't matter for the rest of the software if the LGPL part is under LGPL or any other license. LGPL creates a license for the FOSS part, NOT for the software linking in that FOSS part. You however started arguing about midgard being LGPL and THUS Nokia could publish closed blobs. Which is kinda true for a "otherwise they couldn't" but nobody ever doubted that Nokia had the right to publish or sell or nuke or eat that stuff. It's about the community/general-public being allowed to use that stuff without Nokia's consent, which for sure is true for midgard, and according to my POV also is true for the PHP scripts techstaff wrote to replace the Nemein scripts. About logos, please refer one of my previous posts which clearly shows they are CC and not proprietary like you claimed they were. For the rest see definition of "content" and "skin" in wiki, I lnked to it in one of my previous posts. Nobody said content=executable-code

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Excuse me if I stop replying then... Communication is bi-directional. You're only interested in pushing your point, not trying to understand the points of others. Nothing makes this more clear that the above statement.

Says the man claiming I'm an aircraft mechanic.

Sorry, but the biggest perpetrator of this is you. You (intentionally or not) hear what you want to hear, and once heard can not be convinced that you may have misinterpreted something, or missed an important piece of context.

Case in point: The idea of membership dues. There was a discussion on TMO about how to keep the GA roster from becoming stale, like the garage account list is now. (~1,000 actual active users with ~60,000 accounts showing.) Because that presents problems with quorum and several other issues in legal groups. One idea (of many) was to charge some tiny amount, like 1€ per year. Those going away would likely stop the payment, because people pay attention to money, and could be dropped from the roles as they diverge from the community. (This was not a "pay per vote" issue, more of a role-call issue.)

Somehow you read that as it's all been decided, and post out:
Do you see this? Do you see how you are doing the very thing you accuse me of? Taking things "out of context, and put them into a completely different, then go on tedious length about that false context and conclusions thereof." Yet to you, this is justified when you do it.

As for the rest: You said you didn't, then admit you did. You "twist my words" again, claiming I said things I did not, even messing that up (it's LGPL, not GPL, there's a significant difference). And again, you stop listening.... So I stop replying.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

See? You're doing same again during first 5 words you answer to my complaint.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Again you do the thing you accuse me of. I said nothing about LGPL allowing Nokia to publish closed blobs.

I said, rather clearly, that the site in it's whole was owned and copyright by Nokia/Nemein. And that as such they had full legal rights to claim large chunks of that was "work for hire", which they technically own and must protect as a company. They chose to not make all of that "FOSS", mainly because they were not sure how much of it may or may not contain things they don't want public, and had no time, desire, or manpower to check. Instead they chose to transfer those rights to another legal entity, and HiFo was that legal entity.

The topic of "blobs" was as separate one, where you have been claiming "everything is FOSS", including device images and the like. Clearly the EULA indicates that not to be the case, and since the images fall under the EULA (which even you agreed to, having used at least one Nokia product in this family line), they are not something we can redistribute.

Again, you may make that legal argument with any court you want, on your own dime. But I (and HiFo, and those involved) do not want to fight that fight, because I/we were of the belief that there is legal ground for Nokia's point of view. We did try to negotiate this with Nokia, several times, and got a firm "these are the conditions" each time. Our choices were, accept those conditions, or tell them no and have them turn the servers off. And if you think for an instant Nokia would not have their legal team show up at IPHH to enforce that order, and reclaim the servers and contents on them, then your daft.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Err, the conditions of Nokia were to deny the objective truth of midgard being FOSS as well as stuff that OUR maemo techstaff wrote being FOSS? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Sorry when I can't help but suspecting that it's been the poorly phrased question rather than the notion of those who answered which been the major color in this paint.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Back to other people besides Joerg...

Yes, with stipulation. There are legal proceedings required to spin down a corporation. (Filing papers, announcements, etc.) There is also a required time frame for this to happen in, to give collectors time to submit claims against the corporation before it goes away. We really should have none of those, but the time frames still apply, since there's no way to "prove a negative".

Which is always the question. The banking issue is, in fact, the thing holding everything else up right now. Banks are picky about setting up accounts, doubly so for corporations and e.V. apparently. The desire would be for all on Board to have access rights, which is why that option is being sought after. But it's hard to find a bank willing to do this.

Understand, I was not picking on Joerg for his language usage unprovoked. Several here are non-native speakers, and I get that, and try to read intent through whatever broken grammar there is. I speak 3 languages, and know 4 (one is sign language), and I'm far from proficient in any of them. I know how hard it can be to properly express oneself in a non-native language. There are several posts (in this thread alone) with improper grammar, mixed word usage, or improper phrasing, and you don't see me correcting any of them, do you?

That's because most don't have the audacity to claim a native speaker is:
Imagine if I were to butcher something, posting in the child-level German that I vaguely recall from classes decades ago. Then, when someone doesn't understand what I'm saying, I become belligerent and accuse them of being too ignorant to speak their own language. Sorry, but anyone doing that, in any language, gets what the deserve when others correct their own improper usage. Even native speakers will do that against each other when one picks on anothers grammar. Tit for Tat is the English term for that.

I get his point: That he feels I'm not interpreting what he says correctly. That can be frustrating. Yet when the same thing happens the other way, where he misinterprets what someone else says, it's clearly all their fault for saying it wrong. And convincing him of reality one he's interpreted something in his head is near impossible.


And yes: I will admit there are times I do this myself. But whens someone clearly says "Stop. That's not what's happening at all. Let me explain." I generally give them the option to do so, and am open to the possibility that there was misinterpretation somewhere.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

See http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...90#post1441290, you either didn't read it or didn't get it. Perverting simple aristotle's traditional logic is not a smart thing to do in *any* language. I say X and you bash me for saying Y. I say you abuse language or ignore logic or whatever. And you again perverted my words.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Sigh... This is nothing to do with MidGard being FOSS! It really doesn't. MidGard is, in fact, a sell-able product via LGPL. Bergie specifically put MidGard under LGPL so he could SELL CM sites to companies, where they would be the legal owner of the resultant site, including any customization they needed. This was the entire business of Nemein, creating CM sites based on MidGard, and selling those sites (and occasionally ongoing service) to companies.

Nokia doesn't know MidGard from vBulletin. They purchased a site, with maintainance, from a vendor, and had them add custom things to it over time. That includes the licence/IMEI validator, and other things they may not want to have been public, and later things this strange little "community" was asking them for occasionally. By time they were facing shutting it down, they weren't quite sure what was on there, but they knew they "owned" it, and could shut it off at will.

The idea of making everything FOSS was a no-go from the start. We did ask. Nobody wants to sign a document saying "all the stuff in this box is free" without knowing how to look through the box or evaluate what any of it is.

The "safer" alternative was to sign over the rights to a group that would be legally responsible for it. That limits their legal liability to some degree. But there were a few items where that wasn't the case. In particular they knew (from the EULA) there were 3rd party blobs in the device images where they had specific contractual obligations. So those were explicitly called out and denied in the transference documents. Again, we fought to include them, but there was no budging.

So tell me: Which would you rather have? A legal entity that holds the rights to oversee the parts we have left, or the site shut down almost 2 years ago? Those really were the only choices.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

It's utterly useless to argue with somebody who thinks IP can get defined based on a fuzzy "we paid for IT, so IT is ours", when the one stating this has no faintest clue what "IT" actually consists of. I explained to elaborate length which makes your ears bleed that "IT" right now (to my knowledge) has nothing Nokia produced and didn't instantly put under CC licnse and thus Nokia can not claim ownership in it. The "skin" is not patentable or potectable by any copyright, neither is the theme, and the logos are even explicitly published under CC (see previous post) - nobody can stop me from creating exactly same site from scratch right away, by copying all the publicly available content and scripts from SVN. And nobody can sue me when I do so, since nothing in all this *) is protected under any licence (except CC and GPL).
Which basically is what techstaff did - and I'll do again since this site and servers are obviously squatted by owners that have no clue.

*)any blobs of third parties or whatever are not available from *.maemo.org. Period. And nobody *can* shut down this site, since there for sure are a dozen mirrors already (consisting of 100% FOSS/CC content) which would run exactly what we got/need from maemo.org, just under a different URL (since the URL actually is owned by Nokia. Heck maybe we even had to use sed -i 's/maemo/meamo/ `find / `, wouldn't kill us, just annoying)

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

And this is the exact scenario that caused my resignation. When I was unable to trust (root of the word "trustee") that acts being carried out were legal. So, not as bizarre a scenario as you may think, having already happened here.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

As noted by Wikiwide: Actions that may seem legal, or may even be legal in and of themselves, can still land those in charge in a pot of mess.

Lets assume someone made a new program, based on an existing GPL source code (since that's been the rave to talk about of late). We both know that since it's GPL, it's all fine to post, right? But if Apple claims there's some patent infringement, who decides if that should stay or not? The community? The BoD? TechStaff? And if they come after us for damages, which will easily dwarf the pittance we have in the bank, who gets stuck with that?

Legality isn't always the shield one would hope it is. In a perfect world, where attorneys are paid for by the government, and are as effective and efficient as the ones large companies can afford to pay for, maybe. But that's not the world I live in. And I frankly doubt there is such a place where we could start our company and have that blessing.


Agreed, but again, it's not just a matter of illegal activity. And even then, stopping the activity doesn't mean there won't be challenges in the social arena. Especially when one is railing "it's all FOSS", while the other is looking at case law that indicates the odds of spending time in jail are high, even if one has a German screaming "it's all FOSS" in the courtroom during trial... :rolleyes:

That is also true. Though I do see the need for Council diminishing with the size of the community. Frankly, with the levels of participation right now (via recent polls, elections, and even site visit stats), the need for a focusing group to channel those voices into 3 or 5 is less needed. When we were thousands, or even hundreds, it was needed. The last vote total was what, 83? Do we really need 5 people to "focus" that small a group?