Git and Software Freedom Conservancy ==================================== (moderator: Taylor; notetaker: Patrick) * Taylor: Sent out new mail to the list with SFC activities. * https://lore.kernel.org/git/Zusxcweod1O88h7j@nand.local/T/#t * LOTS_OF_MONEY spam alert * Generally have more money in our account than we know what to do with. * SFC consists of 4 persons: Junio, Taylor, Ævar, Christian * Taylor: Trademark discussion * Enforcing the trademark is untenable because there are so many projects out there using "Git". We cannot go after those to defend our trademark, and would also not be in the spirit of the Git project. * Taylor: Money * We've got a large amount of money for an OSS project with few expenses, $90k USD. * Heroku is our biggest expense at $60 USD/mo. * What can we do with this money? * Chris: Mentor Outreachy this year, we'll likely have to sponsor them. * $8,000 USD/student. GitHub can probably cover one or two such students. * GitLab sponsored last year, but getting funding was taking a very long time on their side. John probably doesn't want to repeat the process again due to the hassle. * Jonathan: Git gets money due to GSoC, too. These kinds of mentoring projects are things where it's easy for donors to justify giving. * Chris: We do get money indeed due to the GSoC mentoring. * Chris: We have tried to sponsor travels for GSoC students in the past to come to Git Merge. Was quite easy to do that with our funds. Covid restricted that somewhat. * Students used to have problems acquiring a visa, creating a catch 22 because we had to book the flight up front, but it wasn't yet clear whether they'd get the visa. BUt without the flight, they wouldn't get the visa, either. * Peff: THe wasted money on that is probably small enough compared to how much funds we have, so the risk is comparatively small. * Jonathan: Do we have a rough estimate around how big yearly influx minus expenses is? * Taylor: The exact year is $93k USD. It's hard to tell exactly due to changes in reporting by SFC. Last year it was roughly $89k USD, so only up ~$4k. Typically we have a yearly income of around $10k-$20k USD/yr. * Peff: if you want something, would be relatively easy to run a fundraising campaign for Git * brian: I'm sure that we can easily raise additional money via individual contributors, too. * Jonathan: If we have the money for it, I think it might be relatively easy to justify hiring a full-time community manager for the Git project, for example. * Peff: 90k is a high amount of money to do small things, but it's not really enough to actually sponsor full positions for an extended period of time. * brian: True. Nobody is going to work for you without insurance, so it indeed isn't all that much money indeed. * Jonathan: Edward Thomson also mentioned that libgit2 passed on some money to other projects that can use it better * Emily: also wanting to spend money on contracting on particular projects * Brian: there are people who do contractor work like this. I just don't know whether we can find somebody who is willing to accept taht little money. * Emily: Developers are expensive, tech writers are a lot cheaper. Would that be a viable option? They could for example rewrite lots of our documentation. * Johannes: We could delete obsolete documentation! * Patrick: I tried to do this on the GitLab side, but it never really worked out. They didn't want to join the Git mailing list. * Emily: Same. * Mark: There would be some concern about having tech writers interact with the mailing list flow. * Peff: Ævar is not active on the PLC anymore for a long time. Should he be removed? * Taylor: We've been talking about that in the PLC. There are two options: * EIther remove him without replacement, such that we have three people on it. That would also make it less awkward when it comes to voting ties. * If we replace him, it would almost happen to have to come from someone who isn't affiliated with a large forge / company. We already have representation from GitHub, Git Lab, and Google, so would want an OSS contributor not affiliated with a major company. * Ideally I would like him to come back, but haven't been able to hear from him whether or not he is interested in doing so. * Michael: The trademark was originally owned by GitHub? * Peff: The git-scm.com web site was originally owned by Scott, was then moved over to SFC. The SFC applied for the Git trademark, came to an agreement with GitHub about details of how it would relate to the GitHub trademark. * Michael: Is there any obligation of Conservancy to GitHub that the trademark is enforced? * Peff: No. * Michael: Background is that the proposal was to stop enforcing it. SO the question is whether we have to due to an agreement. * Johannes: You lose the trademark if you don't enforce it in many different countries, so we either have to or don't and may thus lose it. * Chris: We mostly enforce it by privately emailing e.g. website owners that use Git in a way we don't agree with. So we do enforce it as necessary, even if it only happens very infrequently. Some companies do not register a trademark that's conflicting, but they still try to use it. * Jonathan: I think it would not be a good choice to not be assertive about the trademark at all. On the other hand, filing lawsuits against low-harm cases doesn't seem like a great use of time and money. So I feel like the current balance is sensible. * Peff: SFC's lawyers might disagree with that assessment. * Taylor: They want to see some new version of the trademark where we e.g. only enforce our trademark on the logo. * Chris: We raised the question a couple years ago of what to do about the trademark, and folks basically agreed with the current way of how we handle it. * Brian: Debian has a trademark policy that might be sensible to have a look at for inspiration. It e.g. says that you have to communicate truthfully. * Peff: We have similar stuff like that in our policy. The problem is that back when writing it we had another company that was trying to use the trademark for a "shitty" reimplementation of GIt, and we didn't want that. We don't really care for "git-foo". Dashed commands are explicitly allowed. GitOxide is e.g. technically against the trademark policy due to being CamelCased, but we are fine with it. * Taylor: We cannot do that, we have to consistently enforce the trademark. It needs to be very strictly defined what is and is not okay. * brian: it needs to be definitive whether you're doing the "good" or "bad" thing. * Jonathan: It might be interesting to tie this to compatibility with the Git test suite. SO if you pass it you are allowed to use it, otherwise not. * Jonathan: So IIUC, we have questions for the SFC lawyers because we canot really answer a lot of the questions? * Chris/Taylor: We can do that. * Taylor: We will talk offline to figure out who does what.
