 The first time a meeting of the SPI board was this late getting started, so this is actually probably a good thing. So good morning. Thank you, everyone, for getting up on a Saturday morning and coming to this meeting. I'm BDL Garby. Among other things, I serve as president of software in the public interest. I'm Jimmy Kaplowitz. At various points in the past, I've been secretary and treasurer. Right now, I'm just a rank and file board member of SPI. I'm Yoke Yasper. I'm currently the vice president of SPI. Martin Soehillas, a standard board member, has been served as secretary for a few months. Yes, and there are actually a number of folks who are not here today because, as we'll talk about in a moment, SPI actually has, did I pick the right one? Yes, the board of directors. And this is the list. So in addition to those of us who are here, Jonathan McDowell is our secretary, Michael Schulteis is our treasurer. And at the moment, though, we just completed an election cycle until the next board meeting, I guess. Joshua Drake, David Graham are also members of the board of directors, and we have some advisors in legal counsel. Jimmy, do you want to? Yeah, actually, the election results officially took effect yesterday when Jonathan announced them. When he announced them, okay. So actually, David Graham from OFTC has completed his seven or so years on the board. We thank him for his time. Clint Adams of Debian is now on the board as is Robert Brockaway, who I believe was previously just a rank and file contributing member not affiliated with this specific project. And Jimmy was re-elected, so congratulations to the new board members, not all of whom apparently woke up in time to be here this morning, which is just fine. So what exactly is software in the public interest? That's probably a good place to start. How many of you do not know what software in the public interest is? We have a couple, okay. The public interest is a nonprofit corporation based in the United States that was founded in 1997 to provide legal and financial existence for the Debian project. And fortunately, at the time it was created, the people who founded it had a broad enough thought about what SPI could become that they didn't just set it up to provide services for Debian, they set it up to provide services for all worthy free software projects. And so over the years, we have, through a process of investigation, examination, voting and invitation, invited a significant number of worthy free software projects to become associated with software in the public interest. These associated projects are then able to take advantage of our legal existence in the U.S., which means there's the opportunity for us to hold assets on behalf of those projects. Those assets can include money, but it can also include things like domain name registrations, trademarks, and, you know, we have the ability to enter into binding legal contracts on behalf of those projects. But perhaps most significantly, at least in the U.S., it means that our nonprofit tax, federal tax exemption status is available to our associated projects as they work to raise money through donations. And we can offer many, it depends, of course, on the individual's personal tax status. But in the United States, most contributions made to free software projects through SPI are in fact exempt from our federal taxes, which provides some additional incentive for people to want to participate and contribute. We've also been sort of fortunate to have various legal folks volunteer their services on behalf of SPI. And so at various times, we've been able to get specific legal questions from some of our projects answered on their behalf. This has certainly been true for Debian, where we have over the years had the opportunity to act as a conduit between the Debian project leader and others in the project and competent legal counsel who could give us advice and guidance on specific areas. Is there anything I'm... Well, we also have an ongoing relationship with the Software Freedom Law Center, which I believe is the relationship, it's the formal attorney-client relationship through which the Software Freedom Law Center and also our other counsel, Gregory Pomerance, are representing Debian. That's the relationship through which they're working and also, of course, that's available to our other projects as well, which will be useful for various issues related trademarks and other things. Right. Anything else, though? I guess historically there have been at least a few times where we've provided some specific technical resources to different projects. We've also agreed to do things like help some of our member projects run the machinery for their own internal elections and things like this. And I think with OFTC, in addition to doing what you just said, they've asked us to, like in case they stop following their constitution, they've asked us to use the fact that we legally own their domain name to help enforce their own constitution at their request, although it's thankfully neither been necessary nor looks likely to ever be necessary, but they did request that. And they don't actually accept donations via us at their own decision, so they don't need the money. So, yeah, we did previously, I don't know about currently, you could say more about that, but we did post some websites for a few projects. We are currently hosting, well, everything that Fresco is using, especially Synopsys in that part. We're having a whole machine for them. And regularly we are hosting the Wikimedia elections. So the usual admins of Wikimedia cannot modify it, it's one on our server. They're not actually an SPI-affiliated project, but that's just a courtesy thing because we're external to them. And over the years we've been very pleased to be able to form good working relationships with some other peer organizations. We have in the past had really good relationships with the Free Software Foundation, for example, more recently and perhaps more immediately relevant. I have an excellent working relationship with Bradley Kuhn and the other folks at the Software Conservancy, which is another organization that can provide hosting for free software projects. Software Freedom Conservancy. Yeah. Software Freedom Conservancy and the sort of set of services and the way each hosting organization chooses to interact with its projects is sufficiently different, that we don't actually compete. We in fact cooperate very well either side that a project comes to and begins the conversation about how should we get some services. We will direct them in the other direction if we think their needs are a better match for the other organization. Despite all of that, as I mentioned, our list of associated projects has grown quite a bit. Let's see, let's take that back up one and where is it? Projects. And so part of the reason I'm driving the website this morning is that one of the major things that we did within the last year is to change out the technical infrastructure behind our website. We've been running on an old content management system that none of us who are currently actively involved in the board and in the core of SPI knew really how to do anything with and every time we tried to change anything we seem to be quite good at breaking it and so we have switched everything over to icky wicky with a get back end and we all sort of know how that works and the process of updating web content as if it were source code and pushing it to the get repo and magically it shows up on the website just fits beautifully with our sort of normal working processes and as a consequence while there's still some content that has not been completely filled in again from the old website, all of the things that are really important on a day to day basis are there. Everyone who has navigated it says, yep, it's easier to find things than it used to be and we're actually doing a better job of keeping things up to date than we used to. So all around I think that was a good technical change. As you can see there's a significant list of projects here and I suspect all of you recognize at least some of these and some of these are fairly large projects. In the last year we've been pleased to add a number of new projects. I think it might be easier to just go grab the annual report and pull up its stuff about that. We are actually in the process, have we actually released, I guess we did actually release the annual report or is it still in draft? Well we released it at the meeting and we used the word drafted in adjectives so I'm not really sure how that counts but this was released at the meeting. Right, so I'm a couple interesting statistics, actually I should probably blow this up a little bit shouldn't I? Does that help a little bit? Can the video team see that okay on the video? Let's take it up one more click. That's probably even better. Okay so this is with respect to membership to give you some sort of idea. At the time the report was put together we had 436 non-contributing members and 449 contributing members and a number that were in different states of application for different status. The way we work in SPI is there's no fee to be a member. But anyone who wants to associate themselves with SPI is invited to become a member at the non-contributing level and then there is a separate application step if you want to have your membership upgraded to contributing member status. Contributing member means that you're someone who contributes actively to the free software world. For example if you are a person who has commit access or is a developer by some other definition for any of our associated projects you will be immediately granted contributing member status. Other worthy contributors to free software who are not directly involved with our associated projects are also free to become contributing members. The difference is that if you're a contributing member you get to vote for members of the board of directors in our annual elections and you have the ability to read a mailing list that is constrained to just contributing members where we do things like discuss the pros and cons of inviting new free software projects to join us as associated projects. So that's about that. Talked about that, board changes, blah, blah, elections, ah, the treasure report. So during the course of the year, SPI accepts donations on behalf of our associated projects and this is some indication of the income, the ordinary income during last year and how it was marked for each of those projects. When people make a contribution they have the ability to indicate which project they are making that donation for and we honor all of those earmarks. It's also possible to make a general donation to software in the public interest which goes into our general fund and helps to provide us with the money that we need to operate SPI. You'll also see a line down there called SPI 5%. For at least some of our associated projects, I don't remember if it's all of them right now or not, we collect 5% of the donations to put into this bucket so that we can again have enough money to operate software in the public interest and cover its direct expenses. And then their interest income from the various accounts, these were the expenses the various projects had. Go back up to the net income, that's an interesting number. Ah yes, so the net income for the year was $28,752.88. So you know in this particular year the total assets at SPI increased a little bit but if you look at the amount of money that was flowing through, I'm actually pleased that not only were we collecting money on behalf of our associated projects, but they were spending it and as a nonprofit corporation our job is not to collect huge piles of money but in fact to take in donations and see that they're used for the purposes for which the corporation was founded, in this case to further the development of free software and free and open hardware so it's actually a really good thing at the end of the year for that net income number to be somewhere close to zero because that means that the projects are actually taking advantage of and using the contributions that come in that are addressed to them. And okay so we've got money sitting around, this is probably the more interesting piece though, this is the money that's held in trust on behalf of the various projects and as you can see Debian continues to be the project for which we're holding the most assets at this particular moment but in the last year some other projects, for example PostgreSQL, the openoffice.org folks and this year I guess for the first time we had a separate ear mark for handling the funds that flow through SPI for Debian itself which is useful to keep that separate from the bigger Debian bucket, those have all you know shown more substantial amounts of money and so we are not nearly as lopsided as we used to be where there was a period of time when the vast majority of the assets that SPI was holding were on behalf of Debian and now that's a little more spread out over a larger number of projects and we're really quite pleased to be able to provide these financial, it's not really financial management, it's more you know process for being able to collect and hold money and then disperse it as the projects needed and then somewhere in here there's yeah the new associated projects. So in the last year we've actually had several new projects join as associated projects and this is a list of them. Libra Office, I'm sure everyone in this room has heard of, it's the fork of the openoffice.org code base that's now being managed by the Document Foundation. In the same way that Debian and some of our other projects do, the Document Foundation is establishing relationships with organizations like SPI in different geographies so that they can collect contributions with various tax benefits and different jurisdictions and have assets held on their behalf in different parts of the world. We forgot to mention that about SPI services with our partner organizations. I believe FFIS in Germany and there's one in Italy and maybe there's a few different ones around the world. There's associations where Libra in Brazil is holding assets on behalf of Debian and so a lot of these organizations are willing to work with SPI's other associated projects by virtue of their association with SPI if we make the arrangements in each case. Yes and we've had some interesting conversations recently with people that are thinking about creating other hosting organizations in other parts of the world and we certainly encourage that. We have no monopoly on the service and process and in fact some of the services we provide are sort of obviously useful for projects that are either based in the United States or do business there in one way or another and we recently had a lengthy conversation about one potential associated project because they were based in a geography where it was not immediately clear to us what good we could do them and they assured us that no no no we would be really helpful to them to be associated with us and in the end we decided that was fine. Other projects that have joined Open64 is a compiler project and this is an interesting project because most of the members of Open64 are really big corporations but they created Open64 as a free software project and community to do work on this compiler code base that's important to all of them and the Open64 project needed some place to be hosted and to exist so that they could take contributions from the various member companies and collect those to run conferences and do other things on behalf of that project and so even though it's an interesting project because unlike many of our other associated projects its principal members seem to be corporations and not individuals it met all of our normal criteria and we're pleased to have them as an associated project. Another one is Jenkins. Formerly Hudson. Yes, Formerly Hudson. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? It's one I'm personally less familiar with. It's one of the projects that Oracle Board provides continuous sort of build and build monitoring things. Some of the programs, some of the community members decided to fork from what Currently Hudson is doing on behalf of Oracle and ask us if we can help them. And just to be clear, SPI is not refusing to have anything to do with Oracle. In fact, not only do we have a Libre office as an associated project but despite openoffice.org's recent move towards the Apache Software Foundation, they are still an SPI associated project as well. There's no problem having competitors or co-op predators affiliated with us and we recently checked with them and at least for now they wish to remain an associated project despite their use of Apache. Well the openoffice.org situation is a little interesting because openoffice.org has been a community project and it is not directly affected by the transition of assets from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation. It's all a little bit strange and eventually someone I'm sure will make some decisions there about what they want to do for the future but for right now we are, you know, doing exactly what we as an organization exist to do. We are holding the assets on behalf of an associated project and we continue to treat them the same way, you know, we have. We held assets for the GNOME project for probably most of, you know, I don't know, for a long time. Maybe five, maybe 15 years ish. I mean eventually they had, eventually the GNOME Foundation and us talked and we ended up giving them what we were holding for them. Projects are certainly free to withdraw assets from SPI and put them in another suitable organization but our tax status does not allow us to transfer the funds to, say, a for-profit company or individual if they have another suitable foundation such as GNOME or Apache with the appropriate legal or tax services in places, then we can, then we're happy to follow projects instructions if they were to use a different entity instead of us. We still have one of the open source domains, I think.net. Yeah, we ended up, at some point we transferred open source at work from our ownership to OSI but they still haven't taken that net for some reason. Yeah, it's kind of weird. Okay. And then the last new project and last year was anchor.org.in. These are a bunch of volunteers who work on localization and internationalization stuff in India on behalf of the Bengali language. And, you know, we somehow they seem a little bit farther away both geographically and in other ways but we again after reviewing their project decided that they met all of our criteria and we're pleased to have them as an associated project. And I will mention that this is something that continues. We have now two resolutions on our agenda for our August board meeting to consider offering associated project status to two more projects. One of those is Drizzle, which is the web oriented database that is one of the forks of MySQL. And the other is Arch Linux, which is another complete Linux distribution project. That would be, I think, at least our third. Yes, we already have ActoSid, which is a derivative of DebianSid. This would actually not be based on Debian, which is totally fine. Yeah, we're actually kind of excited about the idea of another whole Linux distribution that wants to take advantage of SPI services. So that's sort of an update on the associated projects and that list. And we have some questions. Yeah, Colin. So I just just related to that. Do you do you find that there's much in the way of cross poll nation below the sort of legal framework level between the SPI affiliated projects as in, so do you think that it might be likely that Arch Linux joining SPI could result in more collaboration between Arch Linux folks and Debian? Is this a sort of pattern you've seen in the past? I think actually I understand your question. And I know I do not believe that becoming associated with SPI naturally automatically causes there to be some increase in the likelihood that projects collaborate more closely with each other. And part of the reason for this is that we have been very clear and very focused on the idea that SPI is a fairly lightweight organization. There's a specific set of capabilities that we have and services that we provide. And we've chosen to focus in on those and to try and do them very, very well so that those things we do are things that our associated projects can just forget about and not have to worry about at all. We have not expanded the scope and role of the organization. We have not become more politically active with a lot of things we haven't done. And that's been intentional. And as a consequence, there really aren't, you know, they're not really sort of extra forms for getting together and meeting or things like that. There are certainly the potential for people to communicate with each other through things like the SPI specific mailing list. But it's never really been clear that that was a more effective communications channel than just talking directly. So while I think we have seen a number of our associated projects work quite effectively with each other, I don't think SPI can take any credit for that at all. And we don't push projects in any way, except that they have to follow the usual SPI rules and stuff of being free. But otherwise, they can do what they want. And also, when they give us instructions about what they want us to do with their stuff, obviously, we have to follow the legal and tax rules that apply to us with regard to the assets we hold for them. Yeah, I mean, we're not trying. There are certain ways in which we could expand our scope, but I think everyone's probably in agreement on this stage that whatever expansions of our scope we do or don't make, we don't want to impose internal control or governance requirements on our associated projects, because that's one of the big differences between us and our cooperators in the free software hosting organization world. I mean, there are some expansions that wouldn't conflict with that like additional services we could offer or additional advocacy on behalf of the whole community. But as far as providing voluntary opportunities for cross-pollination that are totally non-manitory, one of our non-Debian board members, Joshua Drake of PostgreSQL mentioned that at the PostgreSQL at the PGCon east and west that he's organizing every half of the year in the US on opposite posts, he's hoping to maybe add a SPI mini-conference and that certainly doesn't have to be restricted to those conferences. If people want to do SPI-related meetups of any kind, that could be an opportunity for those who want to collaborate. This is, I think, the fourth year in a row that we've held some kind of an SPI boff at DEBCONF and the notion that other associated projects at their various meetings might want to invite us to show up and explain what we do to their constituent members and things like that would certainly be something we'd be more than willing to do too. Zach, did you have a question? Yeah, so in some sense I see only projects which are associated to SPI as clients of the services offered by SPI. And in some sense, Debian is rather a big client, not because it's more important than the other project, but because it has more money, because it has a longer history, might need more often services from SPI than another project. So my experience, as I'd say, as a client, is that for the financial part, SPI is doing a wonderful job. So it's really the donations and all the reporting and, you know, when we need to pay stuff for DEBCONF or for Debian itself, it's a great job. In the last year, I also used a bit of the, let's say, legal services of SPI. And in particular, we have been to various ways, stuff related to trademark and like, you know, the tons of websites, which has the tons of domains which have Debian in its name, while this is not permitted by the Debian trademark policy and this kind of stuff. And I find that internally, there were no sort of procedures in SPI to deal with this. So in some sense, it's something that ended up being on me as DPL, which is fine. But while in some specific tricky case, I can see why, you know, I should be involved and Debian should be involved for standard stuff like, you know, going after trademark violations. I was wondering if you have discussed to set up standard procedures so that it's easier for us to just say, okay, you know what, this website we believe is violating the trademark of Debian and we just leave it to you and, you know, that's, and there is a standard procedure. That's a great question. And I think that you're probably right that in this case, you have had the opportunity on behalf of Debian to be something of a trailblazer and to, you know, do some of these things before some of our other associated projects have asked for us to provide similar services. It's also the case that there's been some change in who the people are that are providing the legal assistance to us over the last year or two. And that always results in a little bit of a ripple in the force. But I will take this as an input to the board that we should consider the possibility of providing a little more structure for some of the more common requests. That certainly seems like a good idea. That is good feedback, yes. Yeah. So, SBI gets donation in Europe, in euros, their partners. I suppose that these stay in euros and are not immediately converted to dollars every time. From a legal perspective, those are actually donations to the respective non-profits in Europe that are working with us and our associated projects. Those aren't actually donations to SPI. Those are donations to our associated projects held on their behalf by those European non-profits. So, are these included or not in the numbers? They are not. This is SPI. Those are... Yes, this is an important thing. So, let me spend just a moment explaining. SPI collects contributions on behalf of various projects. But those projects are also free to have similar relationships with other organizations and other places around the world to take advantage of legal circumstances and financial tax code rules in other places. When they do that, the money does not come to SPI. It stays with the different organizations. For example, for Debian, there are now eight places or something like that around the world where money is being held on behalf of the project. It's up to Debian's project leader to delegate someone to keep track of the total balance that's available to Debian. That's a completely different question. Okay. When I go on SPI's donation page, it says, well, Europeans can send money for SPI to FFIS and Italians to the other one, which I forgot. Yes. Say for SPI, for SPI's associated projects. I think it says... I don't know. I don't remember. FFIS holds that stuff in euros. So, it stays in euros. Whatever the wording does say, I'm not actually sure right now, it should say something closer to four SPI's associated projects because the money, the fact that the project is associated, we're using the word associated because unlike some of the other organizations like Software Freedom Conservancy or the Apache Software Foundation or FSF, when a project is associated with SPI, it does not become directly part of or owned by or a subset of SPI. They're free to have other connections and the fact that they are connected with SPI may give them access to certain other organizations like FFIS, depending on their own FFIS rules. I think the simple answer to your question is that that money is held in euros in Europe until the projects decide what to do with it. We should check though and make sure that we understand what the wording on the site is relative to the actual service. I just looked up here on the website and what it says is this is on the donations page. There's a lot of stuff about areas kinds of donors. One little paragraph. Donations in Europe can be done through our partner in Germany, FFIS EFE. If you're interested in using their bank account to save international money transfer costs, please check the instructions for donating to FFIS EFE and they've got a page. There's a link to a page called partnership with SPI and it says that associated projects of SPI which are more or less automatically also associated FFIS EFE. Being an associated project applies a close relationship and a close cooperation between these projects. So I think what that means is that according to FFIS they're willing to hold money for any SPI associated project but I'm not sure that all of our associated projects know this. Certainly, I don't think Debian, I mean we knew that FFIS had some money that was to do with Debian but I don't think we knew that that was something that FFIS did all of their own bad. That's a really good question. I remember some of the conversations that led to that relationship and I'm not actually surprised by the wording that you see there but I think what you're indicating is something that there's sort of two action items for us. One is to refresh our relationship with FFIS and make sure that that's all still good and they're still happy doing that. And number two is to communicate that to our associated projects and make sure they understand how that works. We should also include our other partners when we do that. Yes, we could do the same thing with our other partners at the same time maybe generally freshen that content. But it's not that simple because a project might not want to have some tiny amount of money. Particularly a smaller project might not want any money with FFIS at all and at the moment they might well have some and not know it and it's not showing up in SPI's accounts and somehow it's being money is being diverted effectively from SPI to FFIS without appearing on our books. It's probably on FFIS's books but nobody knows to look there. As I understand the current way FFIS works from following a bit of that kind of stuff the project has to ask for FFIS to open the account for them but they're probably going to say yes because of the relationship with SPI but I don't believe that FFIS would accept donations without any sort of request. I don't know. If it accepts donations, they're earmarked for SPI. So if they're earmarked for SPI then they probably are being held in a general account on behalf of SPI and we should probably confirm that we understand what the status of that is and it should probably be added as a line item associated with the SPI general fund. So we're just taking a to-do list but as we now have our newest board member here he might introduce himself once. Yay Clint. Hi I'm Clint Adams and I'm a board member as of yesterday apparently. So we expect you to be on time to the next board meeting. About that, two minutes left. Two minutes left, okay, other questions? Looks like happy customership. Why is it lying on us, I don't know. I wanted to understand the role of non-contributing members because as far as I see they get a tag, a member of SPI. Exactly. But any mailing list that they can participate in without being a member, they have no vote or any rights. They're welcome to participate in the SPI general member in the SPI general mailing list but we don't restrict that mailing list to just members. So you're absolutely right, being a non-contributing member of SPI conveys no additional rights except the right to assert that one is associated with SPI and I think some people are happy to do that because it's a way of showing a moral support for the project and makes them feel good and that's all great because we don't expect any particular financial contributions or donations of labor or anything like that. In exchange for that, it costs us nothing and we give essentially nothing in return other than the badge of association. I would strongly encourage anyone here to not think very much about the non-contributing membership and very quickly apply for contributing membership because if you're at a debconf, I suppose it's possible that someone random might have walked in off the streets but if you're at a debconf, there's a very good chance that you'll be immediately accepted as a contributing member and that's the status you'd like to have in order to be able to participate in our board of directors elections and things like that. People ask me sometimes, gee, SPI seems to just be working fine. Why should I bother? And my answer is always that the reason it's working fine is because there are good people who are willing to stand for positions on the board and to volunteer to do other work that's necessary to keep the basic services of SPI working and those people almost always come from our contributing membership and the contributing members through the process of electing board members every year help to ensure that we have the right kind of people who care about free software and will do all of the right things on behalf of our associated projects on the board. We need to break, we are finished. Time out. We're done. So I would just encourage all of you to join SPI, become contributing members and please don't think that it's a huge burden but if there are things that you are willing and able to do to help us we would very much appreciate your help. Thanks very much for your time and attention, Smith. Thank you.