Governance of Wine with respect to the Software Freedom Conservancy (update October 2011)

[Jeremy White]

Hi Folks,

I try to send out a periodic message to the wine-devel mailing list
outlining the 'corporate' structure of Wine and how some decisions are made.

We work with the Software Freedom Conservancy.  They manage the pieces
of Wine that benefit from a formal organization, such as managing money,
holding Trademarks, and so on.

The primary activity we have conducted with them over the past several
years is managing money - about $3,000 each year.  They manage all funds
donated to Wine - the donate button goes into a bank account they manage
and any larger private donations go there as well.

For decisions on how to spend funds, we've adopted a loose set of
guidelines.  That is, we have a decision group and we require a majority
of members to approve any spending.  Alexandre and I are the current
members of that group.  We also claim the right to appoint anyone else
to replace or augment the decision group.

We CC all decisions to an auditor.  We have recently asked Michael
Stefanuic to replace Zachary Goldberg in that role.  A critical
requirement, we feel, is that a non CodeWeavers staff member be fully
aware of all decisions made.

We choose this strategy rather than a fully public process so that we
can apply discretion and protect privacy of people that ask for help
with travel funding.

The SFC will recognize a 'revolt' by the Wine project.  That is, the
designated decision group can be overthrown, once you figure out our
evil plans, if the SFC is persuaded that the majority of Wine
contributors agree on that point.  Patch count in the Wine tree will be
the primary mechanism to recognize a contributor.

Finally, all spending by the SFC on Wine's behalf for the last few years
has been related to Wineconf.  That has primarily been to help
defray travel costs for Wine contributors to come to Wineconf.

Wine's income has been around $3,000 / year for the past few years; we
tend to spend down much of the balance each year for Wineconf.

Cheers,

Jeremy

p.s.  One note - the SFC also manages the GSOC payments, although I
believe that they ostensibly manage that on behalf of Google, not really
Wine.  That is generally coordinated by Wine's GSOC coordinator, and
Alexandre and I have nothing to do with it.