 Where's Jimmy? Yeah, where is Jimmy? Okay. Well, we've got loop here. I can replace it. Yeah, you're slated to replace it anyway. So, okay. So, what I... So, Kuhir is... Alright, let's kind of filter. Kuhir does not know what SPI is. Kuhir is a contributing member of SPI. Okay. And then, so there's like maybe five or six people that are not members. Why not? Yeah. Why not? Because no one's wearing the NMQ on it right now. We just fixed that. We've got new people. One of them is sitting behind you. So, okay. Well, maybe if all we accomplish is that you walk out and sign up for the contributing membership, then we'll have made a small success. So, I will do a kind of a little baby introduction to SPI and kind of how things stand and what our goals are and where we're going to go. And then I would like this to turn into a conversation after that so we can talk about the sorts of things that maybe SPI has done and people like and maybe some of the sorts of things that SPI has not done. Is there... Is not done or people would like to see it do in the future? I mean, so, I think that actually a lot of feedback that we've got in previous deadlines at similar meetings like this have been very useful to me and to other people on the board in terms of deciding where to focus. There are some things, I mean, clearly we can't do everything. So, people may suggest something that it's a really great idea that we can't follow up on. But I think that most people would agree that SPI has been on an upward track over the last couple years and it's been accomplishing more of the things that we want to do and doing better. So, software in the public interest is a non-profit organization that is founded to help organizations distribute open harbor and software. But in reality, we focus almost entirely on some of the, hey, you sit up at the front. Okay. Oh, we've got a lot. We have quorum, don't we? Almost. Almost. We're one chart. Yeah, but I don't think we can expect another. Okay, so... We don't expect virtual working. Yeah. So, for a very long time, getting quorum of the board was actually very difficult. And now we almost have it just sitting in this room. We really need to do a face-to-face meeting sometime. We almost have now. Yeah. So, software in the public interest is a non-profit organization that helps people distribute open harbor and open software, in particular free software. In reality, we focus almost entirely on supporting free software projects in a number of ways. The basic... So, I'll describe how that works. Software in the public interest was a non-profit organization that was created in 1997. And it was incorporated in New York State. So it's a U.S. organization. And it is what's called the 501C30, which basically means that if you're in the U.S. and you give money to it, and you give money to SPI, you can deduct it from your taxes. It's like the most charitable kind of charity. There are less charitable charities. I mean, there are some where you get to deduct less or deduct differently. But 501C30s are probably the most limited type of organization in terms of the types of things that you can do. You can, for example, advocate a particular politician. There are lots of limits. You can't run issue ads. If you give money to other organizations overseas, you transfer money, it has to be to an organization with a similar standing, or at least as charitable status in whatever the other rules are. It's a little bit tricky. But the benefit, of course, is that people have a major incentive to donate. Can I add that? It's not just that people themselves have a major incentive to donate, but often employers have matching gift programs. So if an employee arranges for some money to come out of his check, in many cases the employer will match it, doubling the effectiveness of the donation to SPI to size. So there's a number of benefits that in some ways mean that SPI has more resources in the end, because people are more interested in donating to that type of organization, at least in the U.S. There are a number of different non-profit organizations with similar or identical statuses in the U.S. and abroad. The major ones seem to be the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, and then there's Software and Public Interest. And then there are a number of these foundations, which are popping up for a project, which has been something we've been seeing in recent years. So, for example, the Good Own Foundation will create a foundation, and then Pachi will have a foundation, and Gen 2 has a foundation, Sloan has a foundation. A lot of these different groups are creating their own foundations for larger projects, these kind of super projects. The hundreds of contributors kind of level are creating their own foundations to support development. So Software and Public Interest was kind of like this. It was created by people that were involved in the Debian project to serve the Debian project, but it also had kind of a bigger vision, which was also supporting other projects and a wider variety of projects through taking donations and helping funnel that into development or development resources. People can donate a piece of hardware and write off that donation from their taxes, or a company can do this, and there's a number of benefits for this. Yeah, and part of the reason that that was the idea was because it's a non-trivial amount of labor, paperwork, and money to set up a five-year SD3 organization. So I think a large part of the original motivation as I recall from email threats anyway was... Do it once. Yeah, do it once, and then we can serve lots of these little open-source free software projects that pop up. And Debian was just the one with an instant need. But in a way, because Debian is... I find this kind of cool because Debian in many ways is like a encapsulation of the free software universe. It includes all of the projects that would be potential member or actual member projects are within Debian as well. So in this way, SBI is basically, as far as I know, unique. In that it's an organization that is willing to serve a variety of different organizations in terms of potentially holding intellectual property, things like trademarks. And we could do copyright assignments although we don't already. We can talk about doing it for some kind of shared resources, for example, the Debian website, or something like this. Things that are really kind of project creations, which would be useful because there have been situations where people might want to re-license, and it's not realistic to find every person who's made a change to a web page in Debian. This has been a little bit of... In order to say, hey, so do you agree with moving to a different license? I'm not totally sure if the existing Debian website license would be legitimate for packaging within Debian. That's the problem is that the Debian website license is one that people are not happy with and people want to change. So this is something that has been an idea from changing this to... Same goes for the trademark boxes. Yes, so we've got... So in holding intellectual property, we have holding money. These are the main two things. We also provide legal support because we have a lawyer. Yes, we have a... I guess he's been... We changed lawyers about a year ago, but we've got a lawyer who worked for a little while on our trademark license, and he's actually now in the... He's also a Debian maintainer. He works for a big law firm, and he maintains a couple packages and is in the NMQ, so... Which is probably pretty cool. I don't think any other foundations have lawyers that are possible for him, so... Well, as I understand it, Eben Moghlin got his undergraduate degree in computer science. I don't know that he does a lot of coding. Eben Moghlin, he doesn't do very much. Eben Moghlin worked with his... the general counsel for the FSF, and he actually worked sharing a desk with an 18-year-old... in a computer company. So... I mean, he's a real hockey player, too, but not in the world. So... But... So those are the two major ways. It's kind of like an umbrella organization for other organizations. In reality, about 90% of SPI is the Debian project. There is one board member who is from another project, so the member projects... Other member projects that are active are... Drupal. Or Drupal, OFTC, who is where our other board member is from. Our secretary is from OFTC. Drupal, OFTC. WX Widgets. Fresco. They're still hosted by us. And they still, like, ask things. They don't actually get a lot of money, but they do. We have to host them. I knew we still hosted them, and that project actually still said a number of things. So... We'll talk to Wiggy, and that's about it. Okay. That counts. And then the older... New step. So there's a number of these projects. Basically, the... there seems to be a project that is... big enough. Like Drupal or WX Widgets and a number of these things. They're big enough that they could really use some kind of... They have people that want to make donations of hardware of money and a number of these things, and they're really looking for a legal shell. But they're small enough that creating an entire organization would be a little overkill for them. On their web that they're actually talking about, doing that now, I'm very confused. WX Widgets? No, Drupal. So there have been a couple of examples of projects that have kind of outgrown SBI in the past. Yeah. Little ones, like, no. And the Open Source Initiative. And the Open Source Initiative. Well, there's questions whether it was kind of pushed out the door. Yeah, yeah, I know. Um... Yeah. So the open source... So probably the most famous baby SBI projects that have grown up are the Open Source Initiative and the Genome Project. Which were both... At least some parts of them were within SBI really on, and then they kind of were... One way or another. And wanted to create their own... When, you know, three quarters of the four bad SBI board vanished and left poor Ian as the long remaining board member, you know, the SBI was significantly disrupted for a couple of years. But one thing to underscore, now that I've made that understatement, I'd like to underscore that a lot of people have the perception that the SBI only really serves Debian. But unless $1,000 is a trivial amount of money, you know, WX Widgets had a fundraiser which they didn't actually tell us that they were going to do. But they did it after they joined us and they raised a pretty fair amount of money and we... You know, we got it to them. Yeah, cool. And we actually turned that around fairly quickly. Now this at this point is something like a year at 18 months ago. But, you know, that was one thing I managed to not screw up as treasurer, so... I'm happy about that. So yeah, so there's a number of... So there's a growing number of... And of these... Three of them are in the last year, I think, or in the last... I also point out that the other organizations that do things kind of like SBI and SBI do talk to each other. We have a lot of cross-connections with well, the FSF one is fairly obvious, I guess, but there's actually a meeting coming up just before the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland that I've agreed to show up for, to represent SBI where people from the Brown Foundation and I forget, there's this whole list of other nonprofits and not just from the U.S. but from other countries we'll all be getting together for a couple days to figure out what, if anything, we could share. Sure. Also, SBI and the Open Source Initiative have had mutual observer status at the past and we're talking about re-establishing that as well, which will probably happen. It just occurred to me you didn't introduce us. I'll introduce the other SBI people. You can set up actually and introduce yourself if you have any questions. I am Jimmy Capilowitz, I am the SBI treasurer, I've been a board member since I became treasurer in February 2004. That's like a thank you, let's jump. I think you should know how to make it. I'm Ian Jackson, I've been on the board ever since I can remember and I'm basically just being a pain in the backside. Hi, I'm Brandon Robinson, first while SBI treasurer, I'm now the deputy treasurer. I still get a lot of the mail and the checks and I try to deposit those on a regular basis. Let's see, I was actually re-elected to the board last year. Was it? Was it? I think so. Yeah, Bdale and I ran at the same time and we both got elected on the board. That's who I am. Yeah, I'm Gideal Garvey, I've served as an advisor to the SBI board for a while and then officially as Debian's representative during the time that I was DPL and then served as sort of, I went back to an advisory sort of status after I finished my tenure as DPL and then finally got around to thinking that maybe I'd actually run for a board seat and have been on the board now for a little over a year I guess and continued it as sort of, you know, trying to provide a little adult supervision. So the board, so SBI is a membership organization and there are two classes of membership. There are contributing members and non-contributing members. There are not very many non-contributing members and I have the numbers up here. So let me find the exact numbers, but there are somewhere in the range of a contributing member is anybody who is, oh, there are a lot of non-contributing members. We should mention the other board members too. Okay, so I can't. There's John Goersen who is the president and you're the vice president and Jimmy's the treasurer and David Graham of OFTC is the secretary and we've got Bruce parents he was elected to the board in the same round as myself and oh that's right, we've had two of those options, okay. That's right, Joey Schultz. He's also been on the SBI board for a very long time since before me or VDL, I think. And then, is there anybody else? Or is that... I have the list, so I'll everybody on the board except for David Graham is involved with Debian and David Graham is involved in OFTC and I am also an anomaly an OFTC staff member although I do very little for them. Yeah, for those who don't know OFTC is a largely an IRC network that's an alternative to freedom. That's actually the fullest. That's everybody. And then there are a couple advisors Gregory Pomerance is the legal counsel but that's okay because he's usually at work when we have meetings anyway. And then Jeff Watt is Jeff Watt is at least in theory, well he is actually the genome foundation so this is another way of kind of trying to keep that. He talks to various of us at different times but being an Australia the time sinker. Sure, I talk to Jeff Watt all the time but not only probably every couple months. And at various times we've had kind of a serving board member from OSI the most recent I believe was Guido Van Rossen by the author of Python and he was affiliated with OSI for a time I'm not sure he still is but while he was he sat in on SPI board meetings. So SPI is a membership there are two kinds of numbers that are contributing numbers and non-contributing numbers a contribution contributing it refers to contributing in any way in the software community not to pay money there are no dues to become a member SPI to become a non-contributing member you just sign up is that correct? So if you want to be a non-contributing member you just go to the webpage and sign up and evidently almost 300 people have done that contributing numbers there are also about 300 contributing members and contributing members are people who have contributed in some way to the free software community if you are a member of the W project or another member project it's automatic You're automatically eligible you do actually go to the website and sign up you don't get automatically subscribed to mailing lists and stuff like that but if you're a WN developer then you're automatically eligible for contributing membership and I suspect most people who are in the new maintainer queue because of the fairly high requirements these days most people in the MQC who seem to have sponsored packages and stuff then you're probably also contributing substantially to become an SPI contributing member so if that's something you'd be interested in doing and you're not yet a WN developer don't let that discourage you I mean basically the process works something like I'm a contributing member I work on these projects and then there's a little bit of googling and if it looks like you don't work on those projects like you know I work on Python and then you search the Python mailing list and there's no message from you maybe I should ask you again for some more information but if it's clear that you're contributing in some way then it's like it's pretty easy compared to the Debian NM process it's pretty lightweight we have a recently chosen new membership committee so for a long time it was Martin it was Martin Mechelmeyer and Peter Fossberger who ran the kind of maintain the websites for voting for this whole membership process also the guidelines for joining and then so there was voting stuff and then they in April of this year the two of them said you know we've done this for a long time and we're going to move on to other stuff and so we have a new membership committee so there's a little bit about a hitch in there but so there are a few people equating a couple dozen people but the new membership committee is Graham Wilson Luke Klauss Klauss and Michael Schulteis Schulteis Michael Schulteis is a co-worker of mine I just don't know how to pronounce his name but in the Michael Schulteis he's also a Demian cool so that's our membership committee and actually Luke is also our lawyer an application manager for Demian which is a little bit funny let me mention the main benefit of membership is that it renders you eligible to vote in the elections for the board of directors I don't think Mako explicitly said that but we've mentioned elections to the board and that is how you get a vote is by becoming a contributing member of SPI right and those will happen I guess every year or every other year depending on what people are being elected we didn't require any of this here because nobody's seat was expiring it's for a three year term so I think you probably should be if you're planning on running for the board you should also probably be a contributing member Bruce parents didn't bother and it didn't stop him but it has a rule but you can't vote for your soul I'm kidding and there will be elections next year for a number of seats actually for four or five seats so thinking about this in the future would be good so let me look and see if I have anything else that would be July 1st of next year when that happens because by our bylaws on July 1st no matter what day of the week it is if it's Saturday, Sunday doesn't matter annual meeting is July 1st so if you want to influence the outcome of the next board election you've got just about a year to I think that's dark denomination period I think you can nominate through July 13th or so thank you so in any case Jimmy's got the details there so in any case the last thing I want to say before I kind of open things up is that so one problem with SPI which is actually a problem with the way that businesses work internationally and charities work internationally is that SPI is more useful in the US than it is outside of the US and there was a strategic decision or perhaps not a strategic decision to make it a US organization a lot of people do that but there are still people who want to give money in charitable organizations that don't live in the US and and working with that can be a little bit and just people who want to give money to Debbie Inouye can I come in there and say that the relationship of SPI with say Debbie Inouye indeed with any other project is not exclusive so there are other organizations for example there's FFIS there's the Debbie in UK thing that's new max setup and given that you have to have an American organization for American taxpayers to get those tax benefits there has to be an American organization and that's what SPI is but often it doesn't make sense for people outside the US to deal with American organizations because it's just just too much and also local charity laws are quite often extreme if we were trying to set the same thing up in the UK Debbie Inouye we've set up as an informal society and we have a bank account well we may have a bank account if the bank ever gets a fucking act together they you know in the UK to deal with full on charity is so difficult to actually have the aims that we have well it is in the US too we have to have all of these things as well as that there are some fairly strict rules about what you can do and not do the same thing but it's quite difficult to find the slot of the sort of charity that you are that you can possibly fit into because there are about five different types of charities so SPI is a little bit there are a few things that this is true so it's not only a specific relationship that hold assets for the Debian project or for other member projects for other member projects internationally I've been trying to report on some of those in my DPL reports to date and it's interesting I just want to underscore Ian's point because it's interesting as we as we move DEBCOP around from place to place we seem to find new organizations to become affiliated with and hold assets with like I don't think Linux activatory had very much a relationship with Debian until now and I'm hoping that will be an ongoing thing and the same thing with the well Brazil Linux association software that's right the project in Brazil last year because of DEBCOP 4 so that's been a nice side effect of having DEBCOP globe trot a little bit is that we are accreting accreting yes that's very good thank you so there's also money being stored or beginning to be stored in Linux Australia that's there already yeah and the Christian sort of keeps holding money for Debian in Italy as well and there's money in the UK and there's money in other places so SPI occupies a special place it has an international it has an international award and it tries to represent a larger member of a broader section because there are some things that SPI does that other organization doesn't like holding for example the Debian trademark when the Debian trademark is registered it has been registered internationally like in Europe and Brazil and in Japan and in those situations if someone else registers it our lawyer contacts them and if otherwise we will register it ourselves so this has been something that SPI has in terms of this relationship and it also holds the most money and it also holds the most money for Debian except for Debcombe Debcombe so maybe you might share with us exactly how much we don't know exactly how much money but somewhere in the order of so SPI holds somewhere in the order $50,000 in gross assets of which probably at least 80% the reason we don't have a precise figure and I'll go ahead since I was an earlier treasurer and I'm closer to that fuck up the reason we don't know the exact numbers is because a lot of the early paperwork having to do with the bank accounts that SPI was holding at the time was lost by a previous treasurer, no not me I made different mistakes and so for some very old money we simply don't know how the donations were earmarked we had two different bank accounts with American Express Insurance Bank but one of them got defrauded so it's I think the key is that you do know how much money you're holding but we're not sure what the split was intended to be yes exactly some of it's money but we're not entirely sure what it's for some of it's part of the SPI general fund and some of it's for Debbie when the original screw up the records happened there was a vote it was an SPI vote so just stood up the funds as 80% Debbie and 20% a 5% rule I think it was 95 and 5 and so is there any reason there isn't just a vote out from the side there's exactly this much for Debbie and now not being 100% accurate in our record keeping since then unfortunately I think we have been pretty accurate since Brendan we don't know exactly what the donation what the earmark split is of the donations between them and now I think we've got all of the information but it hasn't been added up right and so it doesn't appear in our look at our financial statements and you can't tell by looking at our financial statements even since then so it's not just one lump sum that's originally one thing that's been happening recently is Jimmy's been doing a much better job than we've seen previously really in getting something like something approaching a normal financial reporting so the other financial reporting is getting better when we're handling it and it's about to get better when we're not handling it because we're hiring somewhere hiring a bookkeeping service in New York City that is just basically going to take to answer your question specifically I don't think another vote is required because what you may have missed and the noise in that discussion is that the combination of that vote and the information that we have records on since then should be sufficient to get those numbers figures don't appear in the financial statement is that a reasonably easy thing or very healthy I think it ought to be easy that it hasn't gotten done I think it will be done so we're working with the bookkeeper for all the information on this here I suspect it will be done in the next month or two so we're going to be so we've got this bookkeeper and we're going to be the idea is sending them anything with a number on it and then they're going to be splitting things up by member project they're going to handle a lot of this stuff and then they'll say here's the PDF with all your information we've been talking about doing this for years it's great that we're finally getting the silly bookkeeping stuff done by somebody who does that professionally because treasurer after treasurer has crumbled under the burden of having to do all the bookkeeping themselves we're not good at keeping things and that's fine everybody thinks it should be a cakewalk so anybody who fails is just a screw up time and again with our treasurers we've just seen that a volunteer can't do it so we said we've got SPI has some general funds there are people who donate money to SPI and don't say give it all to Debian they want to support the organization generally and it seems to make a lot of sense to spend that on making ourselves a more responsive and responsible organization so the two developments recently are in terms of bookkeeping and such is basically a decision to go ahead and hire a bookkeeper in New York City to kind of step together and kind of a little bit of a volunteer from Luke here who's evidently an advanced accountant you'll also explain exactly what advanced accountant is it means that it means when you come to the books you don't get caught he managed advanced accounts obviously accounts that have been offered to someone so we have also a little bit of new blood in a couple different places in terms of that since we're kind of there's not that much time left if people have questions or comments or I think there's been loose hints of where we're going we've seen more new member projects in the last year and a half than we had total member projects before and I think this is going to continue because as we continue to do a better job of keeping getting money sorted out and have quicker turnaround and things like that will become a more attractive place for a lot of these organizations I think of this size I don't think we're going to be having the next Debbie in size projects joining up and that's okay we can kind of another way that Debbie and developers can kind of work with people in the free software community to help I was just wondering might it be a good idea for all the organizations such as SPI FFIS and anything else that comes along agreed to have their membership be mutually members of the elder group so we at least have one it's interesting different people have different impressions when I was WN project leader I asserted that we should just take everyone who's a registered WN developer and declare that they were a contributing member of SPI and there was lots of discussion slash concern about well that would mean they were automatically added to another mailing list that maybe they didn't want to be a member of and in general the perception was that having a larger number of members who weren't necessarily committed to the organization and who wouldn't necessarily show up for elections and make qualms and things like this probably wasn't the brightest idea so at the end of the day we ended up with an agreement that anyone who was a registered developer with WN would be immediately granted contributing member status if they asked for it and so I suspect that the reality is that if you showed up at any of these other organizations and said I'm a contributing member of SPI they would go wonderful we're glad to have you here but my suspicion is that the same kind of criteria might apply perhaps they could be like FFI's criteria for membership do we know? yeah I mean there might have to be like the lowest common denominator kind of level of membership but just so that we can claim you know like bigger numbers like you can see that let me follow up on the details there are also some people who simply didn't want to be affiliated with a U.S. corporation even if it was non-profit even if it was affiliated with Devian and I think one concern that other organizations might have especially if they're smaller is you know they don't want to be swamped with a glut of Americans you know potentially dominating their organization I mean they're trying to set up something local so and this is something that we'll see we've seen with money so for example the money that is put together in the UK is as far as I know spent in the UK you know this is certainly the case in Italy for example as well when they get money at Italian booths you know at booths or something like that they will spend that money to help buy CDs or a banner or something for the Italian booth and that's totally okay that's great and that kind of local support and storing funds is great and I think that the role of SPI and you know Devian is to coordinate that I think this is a question that I'll inject a question at this sort of forum of organizations that's going to be convening before us by the way there will be another meeting of this sort of group of groups before the Aus-Kahn Europe thing later in the year so I don't know if I'll get to that one or not yet we'll see whether this one is sort of repeating I'm kind of related to that I think there's also kind of little amount of fragmentation going on in the US because I think I've read in like LWN or somewhere that now there's like an open source legal center or something there's a very different organization I remember thinking around that time that well that's kind of something like what's the key to that Software Freedom Self Law Center is basically people from the FSF who kind of created another organization that is now kind of FSF is now outsourcing a lot of work too but there's a good amount of kind of legal work that the FSF used to do for itself that people in the FSF want to open up to a wider variety of primarily volunteer projects a simpler way of stating it is that it's attempting to provide legal base resources to the projects and that's a little different volunteer projects I mean it's a law firm if we didn't already have a council willing to represent us in the same way that some other foundations have chosen to talk to SFLC we probably would as well I think that we probably will eventually as well I think we have a relationship with them at the very least before the Software Freedom Law Center was created they approached us and said hey this is what I'm doing he is in regular conversation I've been involved in the Freedom Law Center he is in regular conversation and I think that if push came to shove and SPI finds itself with I don't know or even just in a situation where Greg wants some help because someone says you're infringing on this patent or something I am relatively confident the Software Freedom Law Center would become involved in one way or another one of the things we've done over the past year that brings to mind a service of process one of the things SPI has done over the past year is we actually have a professional company serving as our registered agent what that means is we have a legal address for the service of process which means if somebody sues us it's not showing up in a Debian developer's post office box which was the case for a lot of years and in fact because the address hadn't been updated it would have been Tim Saylor's mailbox in Boston Massachusetts and who's heard of Tim Saylor in the past five years so that's one of the things we've done and so CSC, Corporation Services Company is somebody we have we're retaining to serve that role for us and they're in New York State it's one of the small but significant ways in which we've been making progress over the past year and I can see how other projects might need that kind of service too so if like SPI could become the one stop administrative support for free software projects got this position like I mentioned earlier there are a number of other projects that either do the scale or due to personal or political considerations have decided they'd like to run their own corporations and have been willing to do the paperwork for the US registration process we've ended up even just in the US with a half dozen or eight interesting foundations and if you had in the sort of significantly large enough to be worth inviting for meeting there ends up being a list of almost two dozen around the world but I think we're invited to participate in this upcoming meeting my hope actually is that if nothing else we'll figure out how to share some best practice knowledge there are people for example who've done a lot more work on researching trademark issues and trademark licensing than we have I think there are things that we have figured out that maybe they haven't and so we can share some of this stuff with everything some of them SPI has been butting its head against this problem for nearly a decade and that's much longer than some of these other organizations I mean there wasn't any such thing as more KDE in 1997 so hopefully we do have something to bring to the table since BDAL has been affiliated with them for a while I think he's in a good position to share some of that expertise we'll see how that goes I don't know how that process is going to work out but it's just actually someone's taking the effort it's actually the folks from the Ganone Foundation that triggered this meeting to happen and the O'Reilly folks agreed to provide a place for the meeting to occur before Osconn it's funny for me because I'm not actually going to Osconn but I'm going to Portland for this meeting so we'll come back with something called the Portland prospectus editorial changes editorial changes in the SPI editorial changes we could deal with some editorial changes are there any other questions if you want to get out well actually I've just been informed that we actually have more time because the next door it's not happening at all or it's not happening here after lunch but there's something going on yeah I mean if you people may want to go to the office what time does the next talk start in every room 10 okay so we've got about 5 minutes does anyone else have a question that we're trying to answer right now questions concerns no other questions has this been helpful do you feel more informed about SPI than you did before yeah where do you get the main funding donations we have no source of revenue apart from charitable giving on the part of businesses at mostly individuals so for example about a year and a half ago I went through the little bit of paperwork to arrange so that any accurate employee in the world who wants to donate to SPI can do it through the normal animal giving process through the web interface where you decide how you want to do it I'd like to put a check for you so when it shows there's like one or two people who did it last year I'm hoping it will be more this year as a lumped deposit or something or some annotation as to the names of the people and just as a funny interesting anecdote, Microsoft has a charitable giving program with matching and there was a Microsoft employee who has donated out of their paycheck not being considerable some of the money I think it's in the hundreds of dollars and it's funny because we keep we keep faxing back Microsoft keeps telling us you need to send us information so we can we can't match this and we fax it and then about a month later we get another letter saying you need to send us information or we can't match this and we fax them something so I think we're much too small and insignificant to actually be harassed by Microsoft in this respect but it's kind of funny to see that so maybe someday we'll actually get some money directly from Microsoft that would be pretty funny so what do you think is every year's interest or something like that where SPI should be more active or where people would be needed to be more active but it would be are there any obvious stuff that should be done but isn't done because nobody there's a lot of people who come to SPI and they say I have this really cool new idea for something to do a new SPI should do and well that's obviously just not going to work and anyway SPI only does boring things I mean basically SPI does accounts and historically very badly so if you've got some good thing you want to do then by all means come and talk to SPI and we can put you on our list of projects or something it doesn't really it probably doesn't buy you anything I mean to answer you concretely something that needs to be done is a revision of our bylaws because the bylaws we have they suck they are internally inconsistent and they're awful and before you make what may be the obvious assumption they were lifted wholesale from a boilerplate set of bylaws that I believe the legal firm that originally helped us to charter SPI set up so these are like real professional businesses bylaws that are really inconsistent and they suck it's not like some one of our volunteers I think Ian Jackson if he took the time to do it would come up with something far superior we're not creative enough to make this up yeah so the interest in that sort of thing would be wonderful to have that work done and the other thing is I think it would actually be really interesting to see SPI specifically represented at some of the more interesting conferences and events particularly the ones that have a banner or one other sort of thing like this it's my perception that our pure organizations in other countries will usually show up and have a banner and answer questions from people and get an exhibit and things like that I don't think SPI's ever at least it is something in general of one page introduction to SPI like we can like have a flyer another thing is if people have ideas on how despite the fact that we are primarily useful for U.S. donors there are still lots of non-U.S. donors who want to donate to us and if people have ideas of how to do that without relying on something such as PayPal I don't mind the payment service but PayPal is known to be sketchy so if there are banks but they're not a bank and they go to court so if there's a legitimate reasonable payment service or some other way we've also talked about getting a merchant account with a bank a more legitimate bank but that hasn't happened yet well then PayPal because we're pretty happy with First ID no I'm talking about something like Echo like I mentioned online but yeah they may not know that this is probably going to be an administrative nightmare but could the people in particular countries where if you've got a lot of people who don't want to file it then it's customary it accumulates in the local country if you actually want to get that into the state if you do it in one go so Debian becomes an international courier basically because we go all over the place all the time that does turn out to be pretty hard because of various countries laws regarding it depends on the organization that it's coming from because it's relatively easy to get money in it's not as a past problem but for other charitable organizations we can look like it's a feeder organization but I think that I think that maybe another good thing that could be really useful is kind of helping codify and map out some of the relationships between the US and other organizations like what is the relationship between Debian, between between I don't know these you're saying that none of the all the money comes from donations yeah I mean we don't sell anything in the UK in the UK it's got a few thousand pounds that's all from profits made at stores and experts not that we actually try to make profit so how does that work in the states who gets the money well in the past this hasn't happened lately because what's happened is a bunch of shitload of CDs on people Debian doesn't actually distribute any CDs anymore but what used to happen was we would we would offer t-shirts at various booths like say Linux world on both coasts and in exchange for a donation you would get a t-shirt so the revenues in excess of the costs would be donated to the Debian project and those would come through SP Debian sold that Debian sold those CDs? so the way to so you it happened in in Boston they were going with what you should oh okay okay I was a little angry about we just didn't have enough money I think that money often goes to SPI the money to go to SPI the one from Boston certainly isn't really I walked out with like $100,000 in cash I sent it to Matt I sent it to Matt I sent it to Matt okay because Matt had purchased all the t-shirts so I sent him the t-shirts he took out whatever I sent him a check he took out whatever thank god the funniest check link that I ever got was from Plantatoms after New York one year and the memo field of the check was Linux world aftermath aftermath that's very cute so I think I have to hear it after like I said in the email oh nice basically I didn't want to do that because it's too easy to get lost and it's something you don't want to lose I know check books I have them no I thought that's what you were talking about no his universal power adapter yeah