Wine fiscal governance, Conservancy role, new initiatives

[Jeremy White]

Hey Folks,

At FOSDEM, Alexandre, Michael and I sat down and talked with Bradley 
Kuhn from the Software Freedom Conservancy about the Wine Project.

For those who are not aware, the SFC is the umbrella organization that 
holds Wine's money and it's trademarks.  They also help us if we have 
legal questions, or just odd this and thats that are helpful to a 
project like ours.  They (and Bradley in particular) have been quite 
helpful through the years.

Again for the record, spending decisions are controlled by a committee 
of 5, and we require a majority vote of a quorum for any spending.  The 
quorum for any given decision cannot itself have a majority from any one 
company.  The current committee is myself, Alexandre, Michael Stefaniuc, 
Marcus, and Austin English.  The committee is self replacing, so if one 
steps down, the remaining members nominate a replacement.  The SFC will 
recognize a 'revolution'; if the committee is clearly out of step with a 
majority of Wine contributors, it will force a change.

In practice, the committee mostly decides who to fund for travel to the 
annual Wine conference.

We have in the past agreed to provide SFC with 10% of our income to help 
them provide the support and staffing.  We are still working on revising 
the formal paperwork to back this, and will likely be presenting that 
formal paperwork sometime this year (hopefully :-/).

Bradley proposed one new idea that I think is worth while:  sponsoring 
Wine evangelism.  That is, sponsoring travel to various shows to present 
talks on Wine, or to man a table to talk up Wine.

That seems like a good idea, and we will likely pursue it.  If anyone is 
excited about the idea of being a Wine 'evangelism coordinator', drop me 
a line.

Now get back to work; I expect test.winehq.org to be showing green 
before the next release... <grin>

Cheers,

Jeremy