Nokiabot,
the closed maemo binaries are supposed to get reverse-engineered by FPTF in the long run. An intermediate solution is for users to move their legally obtained maemo fremantle firmware image to their Neo900. That's perfectly legal (afaik). FPTF is supposed to provide a script to facilitate this.
Neo900 group will not ship the device with fremantle, so there's no problem for the Neo900 group either.

BR
jOERG

You found one!

While looking at the existing bylaws, my draft for the articles of corporation and different solutions used by other foundations, I thought that we probably do not want to simply adopt the existing bylaws. There is room for improvement IMHO, especially for the council. Today, council is a commitee that shows responsible for elections, membership and administrative tasks. A council is not a requirement for foundations, but a practical way to handle duties. A requirement for almost any foundation is to have a general meeting that votes for the board. And while the board can decide on its' own about specified things, the general meeting always has to have the highest level of jurisdiction in the association (can suspend directors).
In order to get a better understanding of the structures of different associations, I sketched some basic Organigramms for your consideration.

HiFo with actual bylaws:

How KDE e.V. is organised:

Proposal 1:

Proposal 2:

Please note, that in the KDE e.V. only a selected group (in our case similar to council) is seen as regular members that can vote for board. These select members cannot be voted in, but get accepted by simple majority of active members (~council). Also the supporting members have no voting rights and cannot be regular members (which I dislike, personally). "Now wait, that's no democratic at all!" - Well, true, community has no rights at all under these circumstances. But it seems to pan out right for KDE e.V., they seem to have a solid base of active members. Personally, I don't prefer their model, but it should be food for thought...
I would like to hear your comments on why you consider which model as best for us. Hopefully, we'll see some consent and can soon start forming the articles of corporation to our needs. Again, for now it's just a base structure which lacks definitions e.g. of what council should be/do.

maybe a sidenote: in german "Vereinsrecht" an ordinary member is supposed to register to the Verein and also regularly pay a certain fee per year to support the Verein, while extraordinary members can be everything just according to what the bylaws define as "extraordinary"
It might not have been obvious from above nice useful diagrams.
note #2: generally german Vereinsrecht requires a general meeting once per year, where every ordinary member gets invited. This meeting is the highest authority in every Verein. It acknowledges the last year's work of the differnet Verein executives like cashier etc, means it nods off (or not, sometimes. A huge issue then) what has been done.

(all of the above: disclaimer AFAIK)

HTH
/j

AFAIK, the registering part is fully true, about the fee I doubt there's a minimum that has to be paid though.

No, there's no minimum fee, and there's no mandatory fee either. However all this needs to get clearly defined in the bylaws, and 99.9% of bylaws expect a certain minimum fee (like maybe 5bucks/y) from members to demonstrate they are really regular members, and also to compensate for inevitable expenses of the Verein (if only for the printouts, envelopes, and postage paid to invite those members that can't get reached otherwise, for the Jahreshauptversammlung)
FWIW option #1 looks good to me, though I wonder what suggestions board is supposed to give to council (in a formal way as defined in bylaws). Particularly #1 is a commonly used scheme in german Verein.

It should say "suggest members", I've updated the diagramm. I've made this up as an addition to self-nominations so that it may lead to more candidates. Suggestions can of course be made any time in either direction, while duties/tasks indeed have to be defined and assigned to members, commitees or groups. More below.

This was, sorry, bullsh*t. I've corrected above post accordingly, but for the record it should be mentioned again: all active members (~council) accept new ones basically by simple majority. KDE e.V. handles it this way and I put up for your consideration:

I think I made up my preference and suggest a modified KDE e.V. model:

This of course, is no official HiFo statement or recommendation, just my personal.
I'm sure this would put immediate relief to the issue of chronic shortage of candidates for thr relevant positions. With some dozens or so members who pay a minimal regular fee, like Joerg pointed out, we'd be able to gather at least the minimum of funds that's needed to keep things running. OTOH, I dislike the circumstance that those people who already invest their time and energy are supposed to addionally invest money. But there's flexibility for that too. Exceptions can be made, other contributions may count too and after all, our annual expenses are quite low, again thanks to IPHH.

Those who fear the loss of democracy from ground up (community) - this is a call for your engagement. Segregation at one end comes with the benefit of secured inclusion on the other end. And when I look at the number of voters for recent elections which were around ~100 at best, this can't really be seen as a serious issue. The benefits clearly outweigh the downsides, IMHO.
With this modell, all active members effectively get council rights. They can get involved in every decision if they desire so. Current tasks assigned to council may be handled together by all or by an assigned group, e.g. for sysadmins, mods, voting procedure, Dev groups, you name it. They may even assign extraordinary members to their group at their own discretion if desired. The result will hopefully be to have all the devoted people condensed in a position where their voice will be heard and achievements to the avail of community at large can be accomplished easier after all.

As mentioned earlier, I encourage the idea of a supporter membership and I'd even allow them voting rights as long as they're natural persons and their membership is not obviously conflicting because of third party interests.
And as life shows, the sh*t tends to happen at times... So I also encourage the idea to establish an arbitrating body, it's simply good practice for any Verein, just in case. For this purpose a honorary membership may be established that shall be awarded to select people that would qualify them for the arbitrating body. They may have voting rights in BoD-elections or not, but should be free of fees. If trouble between board and any other party within or without the foundation occurs, this commitee is there to step in and planish things without the need to go all the way through courts, where possible. I'm thinking of guys like former councilors, admins, mods...

This is nothing less than a revolution in regards to the bylaws we have now. But this move to new grounds provides chances for improvement and great opportunitys, we just have to make use of them. So PLEASE everybody share your thoughts on this and advise how to proceed.
(Yes, you too, Dave999, on topic please!)

This issue obviously is blocker for forming the bylaws and we want to make sure the e.V. is set up and the transition incl. handing over current assets is done by the end of march at the latest. As soon as we agree to a principal model, I will present more in-depth options and with some help in the german thread I hopefully will be able to pesent a proper english translation of the bylaws and additional regulations I'm actually drafting.

If you do care about community, please share your comments here or shoot a mail at me. If you're asking "Is this really nescessary?" or "Why Germany?"- well, since woody14619 left the board, we're simply lacking personell to handle core things like bank matters, filing tax papers and so on. Loosing him basically means loosing the US foundation as I see it. At least there's not much I could do about it - except supporting this transformation. And with some support by council and community, this probably is the best thing HiFo ever could do for community so far. Heck, this topic might even make it for #maemo-meeting one day.

Sorry for the wall of text.
And by the way - with the contract signed, we may as well oficially be maemo e.V.

Personally, I prefer a setup where all members can vote for the board and for council. If you define a member by "someone who pays a yearly fee for membership", I'm fine with that too, as long as that fee is not too high. I guess I don't want to see a situation where a very few people (4-5) are steering the Hildon Foundation. Maybe this feeling is a result of the move to a European-only board... people like me (who live outside the EU) who are interested in Maemo and the Hildon Foundation can never serve as part of the board in this scenario. That said, I fully understand and support the move to a German e.v.

Using the maemo name for the e.v is probably a non-starter, not for legal reasons (assuming we get rights to use the name), but for community politics. It was shot-down pretty early on in the process previously as some portions of the community didn't feel it was inclusive enough, and I suppose with Jolla making up more of this community now, that sentiment would only be strengthened.

Not sure if you got the model right. The idea is to pile up regular members and give them "Steering-rights". If you want to serve, become regular member. You could look at it this way: it's an upgrade for the regular members to council-status. Or you could look at it that way: Council becomes obsolete, since already everybody is in.
But again, it's no problem at all to establish a group within the regular members as a commitee to steer or handle things exactly like council does today or in any desired modification. When you look at my last diagramm, just add a circle within the green field "Regular members", cut out "Council" and paste it in the new circle. The more regular members there are, the more it may be usefull to establish that. We can also establish it now and leave it blank until the desire is there to make use of it. I don't know what's best, I'm just pointing to options.
Board only shows responsible for legal matters, handle finances, provides an office adress, stuff like that. What's new: They receive order from the majority of regular members in the general assembly.

[Edit:] So I stressed my layout skills some more... Here's another model to discuss that would include council as it is now, elected by community:

The current system is more like the proposal 2 diagram, in that the Board is directly selected by a general election to serve for a set term, and holds general meetings publicly.

I think all of the systems have merit, and think they would all likely serve the community about equally well. I would prefer something where the general electorate have a direct vote in the leadership of the e.V. directors. In the end, the simplest model will likely be the best one, since the more complex it gets, the harder it becomes to implement (and the more arguments spawn over interpretation).

I also see no problem asking for some minimal support (say 5€/year) but note that requiring such for other actions (voting rights, etc) could become a technical challenge itself. Making other systems reliant on tracking that could be tricky to pull off, especially for existing systems not setup for it (like voting).