 at DebCon for every year for at least that long. I don't remember exactly when we started doing this. I think we actually had one in Edinburgh, but I don't remember before that. In any case, what we would like to do this morning is talk just a little bit about what SPI is, and that includes sort of an indication of who the people are that are involved in software in the public interest. A little bit about the history of the organization, what the list of our associated projects are. We always try to provide a little bit of a snapshot of what the organization's financial status is, and then hopefully that'll only take a few minutes, and we can spend as much of the rest of the time as people would like, answering questions, talking about other things that SPI could do in the future, and so forth. So, software in the public interest is a U.S. non-profit corporation organized under the IRS 501C3 category. Our purpose is to provide infrastructure for free software projects. This is the current list of officers and board members. Those that are not italics are not present here at DEBCONF. I'm actually very pleased that in our recent Board of Directors election, Gregor's Peterson is our newest member of the board, and yet another person not particularly affiliated with the DEBCON project, so over time, SPI is becoming a little more broadly representative, and that's a good thing. Those of you that are in the room that are current board members, please, Martin Nicholmeyer is here, and Zola, and why don't you all introduce yourselves and say hi? Great, so when it comes time for questions, I'll drag them all in and we'll see what we can do from there. So as I mentioned, what software in the public interest is as a non-profit organization that was originally founded, wow, was originally founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. The origins of SPI were that it was created in order to serve a need that the DEBCON project had, but the people that founded SPI realized that these same needs would be felt by other free software and hopefully open hardware projects. And so the organization was set up from the beginning to not just be able to provide services to DEBCON, but to be able to provide it to a number of organizations. From the DEBCON perspective, SPI is the organization that holds DEBCON funds in the US and other assets like trademarks, domain names, and the copyright to the DEBCON logo. SPI was incorporated in June of 1997 in the state of New York. As I said, we have 501C3 status, which means that financial contributions made by individuals or corporations to SPI in the United States may be tax deductible. And I've already talked about the fact that we support a bunch of other projects. And this is the first of a couple of slides showing some of the logos of the organizations that we provide services to. If you don't recognize all of them, that's okay, because I have a hard time putting all the names and faces together, too. But over the last couple of years, we've ended up with quite a few associated projects. In the last year, the two new ones are Chakra and the Manaworld, as far as I can remember. I think those are the only two new ones in the last year. We are currently in... Zero AD, I thought, was before that. I don't know if we've gotten them on the list, but I thought that was... Oh, yeah, yeah, here it is. I think that was before DEBCONF last year, but I'm not 100% certain. There are a couple of really well-known, high-profile projects that we're having conversations with right now, but it's premature for us to talk about that publicly. The nature of the relationship we have with these projects is that when they become associated with software in the public interest, they have the opportunity to take advantage of our mechanisms for managing financial contributions for babysitting assets of the kind that I talked about earlier, and we have the opportunity to help connect them with competent legal assistants when they need it for contracts and other sorts of things. But we don't try to control the behavior of these projects. We don't tell them how to organize their project internally, which is one of the things that differentiates software in the public interest from some of the other financial and legal umbrella organizations that provide services to free software projects in other parts of our community. In terms of financial status, our most recent Treasurer's Report was as of June 30th, which that's the last one I saw when I was looking last night. The funds that were holding in trust on behalf of other projects were sitting just shy of 650,000. There's about just shy of 81,000 in general reserves for a total of about $729,000. This is the first of three pages showing the balances of the funds held in trust for different organizations. I will point out that the DEBCONT 14 earmark, I suspect has been tweaked a bit since then, since we are all here and I'm sure monies have been spent that were gathered to. So one of the things that's happening is for an event like DEBCONT, sponsors who are based in the United States who want to sponsor that event will channel their funds to SPI and then we help to get them to where they need to go to meet the actual needs of the event. But as you can see, there are quite a few projects and here's the second page worth. And you know, at this point, DEBCONT is still one of, if not the largest, from at least from financial assets standpoint, organizations that we're providing assistance to, but there are a number of others that have gotten to be fairly significant as well. And then there's mostly defunct OSU Next project that we still have $2.92 from. Okay, so anyone who agrees with the principles of SPI is encouraged to join the organization, apply and become a member. Those who participate actively in the free software community. And by the way, if you're here at DEBCONT, no question, you qualify as participating actively in the community, may apply for contributing membership. And the only real distinction is that contributing members get to vote and get to help select the board of directors. And that's the URL you can go. Is that, is the about SPI still the right place or? I'm not sure that URL is actually right, but again, checking things in the middle of the night. In terms of getting involved, we have a monthly board of directors meeting that's held on IRC on the hash SPI channel on the OFTC network. There's several mailing lists. There's one that is only accessible to contributing members and one that's wide open. But joining those lists is a good way to see what's going on. They are relatively low traffic. I've said several times in the past that you know that we're doing well and the organization's working the way it's supposed to when you sort of don't notice that we're there. And over the last couple of years, there have been times when we've been sort of embarrassed by associated projects that had needs that caused us to have to scramble around and get information and data together. And that reminds us that we can always use more assistance. If people have time and are interested in helping with our various processes, those are things that we would very much be willing and able to take advantage of. And then there is, as I said, there are several members of the board and officers that are here at DEBCOM who are happy to answer questions. So with that, I don't have anything else presentation-wise to throw up. I'd love to open the floor now to questions, comments, suggestions. Oh, come on. I realize it's early, but, Tom. What differentiates SPI What differentiates SPI from other fiscal sponsorship organizations and how might you guide prospective projects to one or another? So there are, so the other project that I think we probably coordinate with or communicate with the most is the Software Freedom Conservancy. And the Conservancy takes a slightly more active role in the projects in that they have certain expectations about how a project is going to govern itself. A lot of the projects that they provide services for are actually paying developers to do work one way or another. And so particularly within the context of the 501C3 regulations, there's just a set of constraints about how money has to flow to prevent this from being abused in various ways. And they are frankly better set up to handle that and to take that more active role in the relationship with the project. So between those two organizations, we point to each other all the time. We often tell an organization that's coming and asking SPI about the possibility of association that we think they should go talk to the folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy too before they make a decision because it kind of depends on the nature of the project and what their needs are as to which one of those models is more appropriate. There are a number of other umbrella organizations, the Apache Foundation sort of pops to mind where the rules of organization are yet different. In that case, they sort of have a pattern that they expect a project they're incubating that's gonna become part of their ecosystem to follow. And they don't really provide services to anybody whose project doesn't fit well within their existing sort of software hierarchy. There are other foundations like that, but I think quite frankly within the sort of context of the kinds of services SPI provides the sort of interesting alternative to some projects as the Conservancy. So from the experience you've had, if I'm an individual software, free software developer and I say start a project and initially it's just me and then later I've got 50 contributors and it's growing to the point, are there particular threshold events or things I should be looking out for in terms of, oh, I should become affiliated to some umbrella organization or at what point would you recommend I be looking at doing something like that? So one of the real triggers is what's the first time that you solicit or accept a financial contribution? Because if someone just sort of hands you some money, then there's two things that happen. One is there's the question of what are the tax implications of that gift slash donation? And then the second really is what's gonna happen from a governance standpoint? I mean, okay, if you've decided you're gonna have a little meetup somewhere and you need $250 to reserve a room at a hotel somewhere to have the meeting, that may be a one-shot event, the money comes in, the money goes out and there's no significant consequence. But if somebody says, oh, can I sponsor that event to the tune of a thousand bucks and now you spent 250 and you've got 750 left, whose account does that go in and how does it get looked after and how do you know the person that provided that donation is gonna feel good in the end about what happened with that money? Those are, that's probably to me one of the strongest potential trigger points for deciding that it's time to sort of get your act together and get associated with some kind of an umbrella organization. I think the key message is I don't think fledgling free software projects should ever start by thinking about creating their own nonprofit entity. This has happened various times in the past with projects large and small. Thanks to various shenanigans of different kinds in both directions in the US, the IRS now looks very, very carefully at nonprofit organization founding processes, particularly for things that matter to us. And as a consequence, I think that both because it can take a long time to be expensive to get a separate nonprofit setup and because of the fact that most people starting free software projects would really like to focus on the software and not think about all of those things, that picking one of the set of currently existing financial umbrella organizations to associate with would be the right answer. Now from SPI standpoint, if you're a developer and you've started a project and you think it's gonna be the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's not yet time to come talk to us because one of the sort of criteria that we apply is is this a substantial and significant free software project? What does that mean? Well, we have some projects that only have a half dozen or so participants. So it's not really about headcount. It's sort of something we have to decide on a case by case basis. It might have to do with the volume of money that's flowing through in donations. It might have to do with how many people are involved. It might have to do with how many non-financial assets are out there that somebody ought to help babysit. So there's no sort of hard and fast criteria really for that. But I think anytime you get to the point where you're crossing a threshold in the number of people involved in the organization where you're starting to think about how are we going to sort of make sure that as we go forward assets that matter to us are being well taken care of and that somebody doesn't run away with them. Those are also times when it's good to start thinking about this. Generally, do it sooner rather than later but not when you're one person with acute polycode you just put up on GitHub. Other questions? You mentioned free software and you also mentioned open hardware. It's interesting that we're in a point in our movement where the open source initiative has deliberately said they do not want to tackle open hardware licensing. And so what that's meant is we've had the TAPR open hardware license and we've had other various open hardware licenses come along. And so my question to you is based on your experience what does the future look like especially now with the so-called internet of things coming on and hardware hacking becoming very popular what does freedom look like for hardware projects and how can SBI help? That's a really good question. So when SBI was started the founding documents talk about open hardware and open software. The only activity that I can recall that SBI has been directly involved in around hardware was an early attempt that Bruce Perens was spearheading to create a hardware branding program. And this was, it was way too early to really have a chance of working but it was in some ways analogous to what the Free Software Foundation is now doing with their respects your freedom branding program. And it never really got off the ground. And frankly since then our attention has been almost entirely consumed by services being provided to our associated free software projects. So to some extent I don't think SBI as an organization has a great answer to your question certainly doesn't have well-formed organizational opinions. Personally, as you're aware and I'm happy to tell other folks in the room the open hardware products that Keith and I and others are involved with under the Altus Metron banner are all licensed under the Tapper open hardware license. I happen to think that license is interesting in that it's trying very hard to provide GPL-like behaviors around hardware designs. And I like that a whole lot better than gee I slapped a Creative Commons attribution share-like on it and walked away. But we have to the best of my knowledge zero examples of any legal precedent being formed around any of the open hardware licenses that people are using right now. So all of that is a little speculative. Having said all of that, if an open hardware project came to SBI and said we'd like to associate with SBI I think we'd apply the same criteria that we do to free software projects. We'd ask what is it they want and need? Are there sort of transaction flows compatible with our processes? Or does this feel like something else we could just say yes to? Or are there set of needs so different that it just doesn't make sense? SBI certainly doesn't want to get involved in sort of hardware production distribution and any of those sorts of things. That's hard and different and really not appropriate for a 501C3. But I could see holding project trademarks and domain names maybe managing some donation flow for a conference associated with a free hardware community or something as being the kinds of things that could make sense. Whether we'll ever have a project come to us and ask for that, I don't know. Other questions? Yeah, over here. So it's regarding machine donation. I would like to donate a machine here in US. This machine is going to be a power machine from IBM. And the way that IBM works is they prefer much better to do a long-term loan other than a donation. So is it okay for you? And the second question is regarding, we have a machine, another machine in Brazil and we are going to have a third machine in Brazil as well. They are doing some building on Deben. Is there anything that we need to do with this machine because they're going to be fully located for Deben? So is there any kind of contract that we should do in order if we are going to proceed having those machines as, because we're still discussing with GSA, if we are going to have those machines or if we are going to have only US. So what is your suggestion on this case? Well, to first order, SPI would largely be involved in things that are going to be donated in or hosted in the US. I don't know that SPI itself has any particular value to add or reason to want to be engaged in hardware that's being made available for Deben in a place like Brazil. That would actually probably be a better question for the Deben project leader and or whoever's managing assets on behalf of the Deben project at this point. In terms of managing something as a loan instead of an outright donation, I see no reason that that should pose a particular problem. Someone somewhere just needs to sort of keep documentation about the status of that and where it came from and who it needs to go back to if and when. And that certainly seems like something SPI could manage. So, I don't know. We have the past and present secretaries both in the room if they'd like to speak up. So I certainly remember seeing something about this query come up and I think that the response at that time was, what was the benefit that SPI was adding in that case? Because it wasn't an asset that Deben would own. It was going to be an IBM's asset. It was a query about whether SPI needed to enter into this Loot and Contract or whether IBM could just give access to the machine to DSA without needing the overhead of SPI being involved. I agree with B-Deal. I don't see a problem with it. It just wasn't clear at the time when someone was asking whether or not it was even necessary. Yeah, excellent point. I don't see any value that's really being added by SPI being involved in that kind of a transaction as long as the asset continues to be owned by somebody other than our associated project. We don't need to be involved. If you'd like us to be involved to help manage that, I guess we could be. It does tie into one of the things that SPI offers in that we are at least a legal entity that can sign contracts such as that if a donor requires that, that is what we can do. We've had a number of cases in the past where one of our associated projects wanted to enter into an agreement of some kind or other and needed a legal, someone legally authorized to sign on their behalf and I and various others on the SPI board have been called upon at various times to assign things and fax them back. That's not a big problem. I will admit that in the context actually of DevCon 14, there was a request for a Signatrona contract that I pushed back and said, no, sorry, I can't sign that. And it had to do with the terms that a particular potential sponsor wanted to place on their sponsorship money and it just was not compatible with a free software project. And they meant no harm by it. It was just their standard corporate agreement thing. They just were surprised that I actually read it and said no. But, you know, sorry, it happens. Other questions? Thanks. I'm just curious if SPI has investments and any kind of, so if there's an investment policy? Not as well organized as you'd like. The funds that we have are broken into several different accounts and they're in different places with sort of different terms associated with them. We, until the last year or so, haven't really been managing an asset balance that made doing something more than parking it in a modestly interest-bearing business-oriented account would have made sense for. And frankly, our advice to our associated projects is to not accumulate financial assets. We would really prefer that our associated projects use the donation stream that's coming in and if they need more, later ask for it than to be keeping big reserves sitting around. Having said all of that, I think as we hit, we're now sort of in the three quarters of a million range, it certainly makes sense for us to be considering that and it's something that a couple of us have had conversations about but we've taken no specific action yet. There's sort of this balancing thing because most of those funds aren't really SPIs. They're being held in trust for the various associated projects and so while there's a big central balance, if PostgreSQL comes to us and says time for us to run another event, drain our account, we need to go spend all that money, the answer would be, yep, okay, here it is. And so we have to be careful about long-term investment vehicles because while we have a more substantial balance now, if you saw it, it's spread over a lot of small sort of trust accounts and trying to do things that have fixed duration, even like certificates of deposit gets a little concerning because we need to maintain the ability to respond with appropriate liquidity to those project requests. Yeah. So what are you doing after you have an entity that's enrolled in your program and they've been with you for a couple of years and it's probably never come up? They ask you to drain their funds, you provide their trust funds back to them and then they're spending the money in ways that are not consistent with your original program. So we've never actually had an incident yet where an associated project consciously set out to do something that was in violation of the 501C3 legal boundary. We've had a couple of cases where a project started with an association with SPI, grew to a certain point and decided it was time to do something different. One interesting example of that is the Genome Foundation. Early in the Genome Project, they were an SPI associated project and when the Genome Foundation got started, obviously they moved to that context. It depends on the nature of that transition as to whether we have the ability to transfer their existing asset balance or not. So for example, if someone wants to move from 1501C3 to another 501C3, it's not very hard for us to arrange for their assets to follow them across that transactional boundary. If they all of a sudden decide, ah, we're done with this, we wanna incorporate and run this some other way, then we can't just transfer their balance out of a 501C3 to some sort of a commercial context. This has led actually in the last three months, we've had a couple of interesting conversations about okay, is it time for us to review and improve our life cycle documentation around what happens when a project vaporizes? I mean, I sort of jokingly referred to the project that has less than $3 asset left with us. That project started off with a certain amount of impetus. They had a couple of objectives that were not met. All of the folks involved realized as a consequence of that that it was never gonna go the way they wanted to and the whole project kind of vaporized. And fortunately, we weren't left holding six figures worth of assets. It was one figure worth of assets. But, and I think in sort of in the absolute limit, that'll fall into our general reserves and we'll do something appropriate with it someday, maybe if we have to, I guess. But this does raise the question of what are the criteria under which we are willing and able to declare our project defunct? We've never really done that before. We had a couple projects where they seemed to go unactive, they didn't have any assets. We poked them and they said, yes, sorry, we should have told you that we're often out of things now and we just quietly passed a resolution to take them off the list and that was easy. But when that happens and there's still assets being held, it's not so easy. So I think one of the action items we have this year is to try and review those elements of our sort of existing process, life cycle documentation and work on them some. In all honesty, if somebody consciously did something that violated our 501c3 status, we'd have our legal counsel involved quickly and we would take whatever the actions were that were deemed appropriate because protecting the ability of the rest of our associated projects to retain their current legal and financial status is far more important to us than looking the other way when somebody does something inappropriate. Yeah, as a spy affiliate project, the experience I've had is that the spy funds management is not as hands off as it would appear from this conversation. Every expenditure from one of the spy affiliates is actually managed directly by this treasure of spy and the funds are transferred from spy to the target, whatever the project is. So if I wanna go buy a bunch of computing hardware, the funds aren't transferred from spy to me and then from me to the hardware vendor. The funds are transferred directly to the hardware vendor. So the availability of funds, an inappropriate usage of funds is pretty minimal because you would have to confuse the spy treasure into thinking that some inappropriate expenditure was conforming to the rules. So there are actually very fairly strong guarantees that it can't happen today. I appreciate you bringing that up, Keith, because perhaps not so obviously, I don't actually ever use any of spy's money. So yeah, any other questions? Okay, well if there are no other questions, I will thank you very much for your time in attendance. I hope that if nothing else, any of you in the room who are not currently SPI members or have not currently requested conversion to the status of contributing member will go back and do that because we would very much like to have your attention and involvement in our processes. And some of the questions that were asked, there are particular areas of expertise or insight that you would like to contribute to the organization. Please let us know. We're always very appreciative of additional help with all of the things that we try to do on behalf of what, as you saw, is a really interestingly diverse list of significant free software projects. Thanks again. Point is that I knew that we had some issues with people signing up to be members in the past. If you have had a problem signing up to be an SPI member, whether it's a member or a contributing member, please come and talk to me and some partners. We thank you for those issues.