 for Debian. And then we have a brief update on financial status. There's nothing there that hasn't already been published in one of Michael's treasurer's reports. But there are a couple of interesting things, I think, for the Debian project to think about there, and then we'll open it up for questions and answers. As already mentioned, I serve as President. Yorgos, Vice President, Jimmy as Secretary, and Michael as Treasurer at the moment. In addition to Luke, Martin, and Neil, we also have Joshua Drake, who represents I think primarily the PostgreSQL community on the board, and David Graham, who I think many of you know from his long involvement with us and with OFTC and other projects that are of interest to us. So what is SPI? Well, SPI stands for Software in the Public Interest. It's a non-profit corporation organized in the United States under the U.S. Internal Revenue Service Tax Laws as a 501C3, which means we are an educational-oriented, non-profit corporation. And the primary benefit of that is that people in the United States who choose to make donations to the various projects that are associated with SPI can gain some tax benefit from doing so. The deductions are generally considered tax-deductible, though the exact rules are something that we always suggest people talk to their individual tax accounts or lawyers about and not take our word on. And, you know, in terms of what we actually do, we are an organization that holds funds and other assets that need some legal, legally existing entity to hold them on behalf of Debian and our other projects. An example of the kind of assets we're talking about is trademark registrations, domain name registrations, and things like this that need some legally existing person or entity to hold them, at least in the United States. From a historical standpoint, SPI was incorporated on the 16th of June in 1997 as a non-profit organization in the state of New York in 1999, which was, you know, two years later, it's about how long it takes. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service determined that SPI does qualify for 501C3 tax status, which, as I said, means that contributions from donors in the U.S. may be tax-deductible. And while it was originally started to serve a very specific Debian need, which was to have a legal entity in the U.S. that could hold these various properties for Debian, SPI was originally crafted with a larger vision, and it has grown to serve many significant free software projects. And, you know, I've got a cute screen full of logos here, which I'll spin around and let you see, just so you get some sense of how crowded the sort of list of associated projects is getting to be. We've got Debian free desktop.org, Fresco, which, even though they aren't very active anymore, it seems, is still an associated project. OpenVas, Tux for Kids, Gallery, the Open Voting Foundation, OpenWRT, PostgreSQL, Drupal, the MAD Wi-Fi Project, Provoxy, OFTC, OpenOffice.org, I forget. All right, GNU, TuxMax, and Helios, right. We also have just offered associated project status to the Open64 project, which is a GCC-derived compiler with various back-end optimizations for 64-bit systems, which, among other things, is being used heavily by the people in the OSUNIX project, which is attempting to build an OpenGroup UNIX certification mark compliant version of the Open Solaris operating system. OSUNIX has also approached us about the possibility of associated member status, and we're currently engaged in discussions with our legal counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center and elsewhere to understand whether, in fact, that's a good thing for us to pursue. This is an interesting case because of the blending of components in that operating system under different licenses, specifically the CDDL and GPL, which there has long been a question about the legality of. So one of the things that's, I think, going to happen sometime in the next month is that we get something approximating a final reading from the SFLC, who also, of course, serve as counsel for the Free Software Foundation on how we should think about these particular sorts of combinations of license, and that may allow us to bring that proposal for associated project status to a vote in August or September. I will just have to wait and see. But I think the key message here is that we are now providing these legal and financial existence services to a significant number of very important Free Software projects, not just Evian. From a financial standpoint, as of the 30th of June, I believe these numbers were, the total holdings in SPI on behalf of our various associated projects was just over $231,000 U.S., of which $142,814.60 was being held in trust for Debian. Now, of course, that number will be in flux a little bit because all of the people who paid professional or corporate registrations for DebConf in the U.S. and, I suppose, in some other countries and various sponsors of this event have been routing those funds through SPI. And so, you know, that number will float up and down a little bit. But I think the key message here is that Debian has now accumulated well in excess of $100,000 in financial asset that's being held by SPI in the U.S. And, you know, that represents roughly half of the total SPI asset holdings at the moment. The next largest, just for comparison, is PostgreSQL with about $30,000 U.S. and the rest of them are all below $10,000. So, this raises an interesting question. I think Stephen tends to have a session sometime later in the week to talk about, you know, brainstorming things that Debian might do with this. You know, people ask me, well, you know, how much money is that really? And the answer that I give is that $142,000 U.S. is not enough to mount a significant legal defense against any kind of an attack that Debian might be subjected to. On the other hand, we don't currently have anything on the horizon that we believe might result in a legal attack on Debian. And so, whether we need to think about that as a possible use of money seems a little nebulous. It's also interesting to me to note that all of this money has been raised without ever actually asking anybody to donate money to Debian. People use the project. They find out that, you know, there's a mechanism for contributing financially and they decide they want to do that. And right now, today, even though there have been various expenditures authorized over the years by various DPLs, including Steve and myself way back when and so on, the rate of income has always exceeded the rate of expenditure. So, we have been gradually increasing this balance over time. There are a couple things I think we can take from that. One is that I think it would be completely okay for us to come up with some reasonable use for $100,000 or so and do something with this money. The second thing that it leads me to believe is that were we ever to face some kind of some substantial financial need, if we actually did ask people to donate money to Debian, I think we could expect to be able to generate a really substantial income stream from people who, you know, care enough about the project to want to donate. We have to date never actually, the best of my knowledge, asked anybody to give money to Debian with the exception of the sort of offer that was extended during the the dunk tank experiment to whether people wanted to support that. And at the end of the day, I think the one thing we learned from that whole experience is that while there are probably good ways to spend money in Debian, that's really not one of them. I'll point out also that when you read our financial status reports which are posted to I guess they end up on the SPI private list once a month and the meeting agenda and so forth, that when you read this, there is a line called General Reserves and the way to read that is that's the money that SPI is holding on behalf of SPI. And with many of our associated projects, we set up a mechanism by which we in effect skim off a few percent of their incoming donation stream to generate enough cash to be able to do things like pay for the bookkeeping, accounting, and tax filing things that we have to do. So far, the vast majority of the actual work being done in SPI on behalf of our associated projects has been by volunteers, but there's certainly a sense that there have been some proposals that have flowed through in particular. The Open Voting Foundation was last year on pursuing a grant application where if that grant had come to pass, I think we would have expected a need to rent an office and have a full-time office management administrative assistant kind of person on behalf of SPI. But the deal that was being worked on was that if that grant went through, they would make enough operating cash available from that grant for us to be able to do that on their behalf. So at the end of the day, right now, financially we're in great shape. There's just over 33,000 in that general reserve pool, which is certainly more than enough for us to have a reasonable cushion for all of the anticipated things that we might need to spend money on. And yet it's not such a ridiculously large amount that I'm embarrassed to have that much sitting around in SPI's general reserves. I think over time we will think about whether there's a need or desire to adjust that percentage that we're charging is overhead to the various projects. If that number continues to go up and we don't come up with other ways to spend it, then obviously that money ought to be put back into circulation for use by the various free software projects that we support. But we'll see how this goes going forward. Any questions about that? I, you know, if you want to, out of curiosity, how many of you are SPI members? Anybody not an SPI member in the room? Maybe it's a better way to ask. One or two? Okay. You know, anyone who is expressed enough interest to be here in this room today certainly ought to go sign up as an SPI member. And I would argue that anyone who's attending DEBCONF probably has completely valid grounds for requesting contributing membership status, which as I'll explain in a minute does confer a couple of benefits, one of which you could actually take advantage of right now. So with respect to SPI membership, anybody who agrees with the principles of SPI is eligible and encouraged to apply for membership. Those who participate actively in the free software community may acquire, may apply for having their membership elevated from general membership to contributing membership, which principally conveys the additional right to vote in things that SPI sees a need to vote on. Today that's primarily the opportunity to vote on who should be on the board of directors. There is a board of directors election underway right now. And so I would encourage all of you who are contributing members who have not already done so to go vote. I think it's probably a good time for us to put a reminder out on our various mailing lists that we have an election underway. We typically have a very low voter turnout. I'm pleased that this year we've already got something like twice as many votes as we acquired in total last year in our board election. But the percentage is still very low. I would encourage all of you to take a couple minutes and go rank your preference among the available candidates. We do currently have 824 members of whom 392 are non contributing and 432 are in the contributing level. All of those numbers are up seven or 8% from this time last year. So we do see, you know, a gradually increasing membership, which I think is great. And the URL for finding out about membership is spi-inc.org slash about dash spi slash membership. Yes, if we could find some more punctuation to put in there, we would. In terms of getting involved, you know, all of our board meetings are held in the open on IRC. The channel is hash SPI on the OFTC network. Discussions are held on a number of mailing lists. You can find those mailing lists and information about how to join them at lists.spi-inc.org. And I really encourage you to take advantage of the fact that we have seven of the current nine board members present this week at DEBCONF. That may seem unusual. We actually had six of the nine present last year in Marble Plata. I think on one hand, this is really great. It's wonderful to see this many members of the board who are actually actively engaged in free software work to the level that they're willing to take the time and the energy and the expense to attend an event like this. On the other hand, it does suggest that we still have a pretty strong DEBCON-oriented bias in the group of people who are running SPI. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I certainly, for all of the other folks who may end up hearing about this meeting or listening to a replay or something like that, I strongly encourage members of our other associated projects to also consider running for the board or in other ways becoming active in the project. We think we do a passable job of providing a balanced set of services to all of our projects, but it would be wonderful to have a more representation and more active participation from some of the other projects. So at that point, that's really all the sort of background contextual information that I wanted to provide. We would be completely happy to take any questions that you might have about SPI, take advantage of the fact that we're all here. And if there are things that we could do differently or better that you would appreciate, please let us know that. If there are other things, feel free to ask. Now that I've all stunned you into a stupor. Andrew, are you grabbing the mic to ask something or just to turn the mic on? Great. Okay, someone have a question? Someone have a question? It's one of these. My, my, this is going to be a very quick buff, isn't it? I mean, if everything we're doing is wonderful, that's actually not bad feedback to have. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to mirror what we hear on our mailing lists. So, Steve. Yeah. It's working. Oh, yes. Fine. So people can hear me, I guess. Yes. So we have two of the three people standing in the election are in the room right now. I guess you want to tell us what you could plan to do if you elected? Yeah. So I would certainly be okay if they want to. On the other hand, I'll point out that we actually had some conversation amongst ourselves last night about sort of how proper it was for us to, you know, even be pointing to the fact that there was an election on given that we're already sort of have this very pro Debian bias in the board and you know, folks that are here are more likely to be Debian people, blah, blah, blah, blah. As I just said, I personally don't think this is an issue, but I just want to point out to everybody that this is something that we've thought about. And if you're concerned about it, fine. If you're not, then I'm not either. So those who are standing for the board include Michael. Michael Popeyes. I am rerunning for the FBI board of directors. I have been the current FBI treasurer for the past two years. I was also serving as assistant treasurer under the past two FBI treasurers. And if reelected, I'm interested in continuing on as FBI treasurer. I'm Jonathan McDowell. I'm also standing. I wouldn't say I was a candidate for change. I think FBI did a reasonable job. I think they've got increasingly better at it over the past few years. I suppose I stepped up when it looked like there was going to be one person to be positioned. I did a good work on that. So I would like to help them in doing a good work when I don't have any huge agenda for change. Yeah. And voting in the elections is really quite straightforward. If you're a contributing member, there's a web based voting mechanism. The voting is a preferential system similar to but slightly different from Debian's. Go read the platforms, make decisions about who you prefer and rank the candidates in your order preference. And that's all it takes should take, you know, five or 10 minutes at most if you haven't already voted. And how long is the election running until the 28th? Right. Right. So still have a day or two left, I guess. Oh, I must admit it's StebConf, so I have no idea what day it is or what time it is. Someone just said, oh, gee, it's time for a buff. Other questions? The attendees, what made you all want to come to this buff anyway? There's been no hackling yet, though. I mean, if you're going to come to hackle, at least, you know, give it a I came along because I think SBIs is doing a good job. But it's an interesting and growing organization. And I wanted to hear what you guys had to tell us about that. And I have. And so that's good. Yeah, I appreciate that. I guess it's probably worth saying that, you know, we've had some discussions over the last couple of years on the board, at least, and to some extent in the private mailing list, which is the one that all contributing members are invited to participate in. We've had some discussion about, you know, should SPI be trying to do more things? And I've had a very simple attitude about that. If there are things that SPI contributing members would like to do, and do in the name of SPI, and they're in alignment with our charter, then wonderful. But I have a very low tolerance for the behavioral model of people telling other people what they think the other people ought to do. This is just not a very effective way for collaborative, you know, volunteer oriented organizations to work. And so when we've had people who've said you should do this, you should do that, my reaction has been sort of ho hummish. My personal sense is that what's absolutely vitally important is that we carry out the fundamental mission and the sort of basic expectations of, you know, fiscal accountability and asset management on behalf of the associated projects that we've committed to do. If we're doing a good job of that, then we're crossing the sort of threshold of acceptable and reasonable behavior as an organization and a board. There are certainly opportunities for contributing members to do all sorts of other things. We intentionally crafted SPI back in the day with with one of those sort of expansive charters that gives us the opportunity to participate in all sorts of advocacy and education and communication processes around the development of free software. But there are enough other organizations out in the world that are also interested in pursuing some of these that, you know, the extent to which I think it makes sense to do this would be the extent to which we have both motivated and committed individuals who want to do it and for which there isn't some other existing venue that's already better suited. I'm actually perfectly okay if SPI is one of those organizations that generally is not in the news very much and is just quietly and competently doing the things that, you know, we have committed to do on behalf of our projects. On the other hand, I'm equally happy if we end up in a situation where there are things that we ought to take stands on or there are, you know, other activities that we ought to engage in. But suggestions of that kind should come with some kind of a willingness to get the right resources together and make it happen, not just, you know, brainstorming. Though brainstorming is certainly okay, too. And if we, you know, this kind of a bough is a great place for us to talk about things that, you know, might be interesting to pursue and to see whether there are others who are interested enough to want to, you know, bring the resources together to do it. So, Phil. I'm being forced to talk here. Yeah, I think this bough is just a demonstration that if you get absolute silence, then it's a massive and rousing applause. Okay. Well, thanks much for that. Any other questions? People waking up and tongues getting loosened or not? If not, that's fine. We can all break and go do something else. But Steve. What's that? Applaud for most of you at least. Okay, anything else? Um, of course, one of the issues that I have brought to the board, and we're asking for legal advice about at the moment, I should just curious to know what, uh, what the board think as well, is we have developed a formal plan for the right to join the area. And we're a little bit concerned about, um, well, the potential for that to be done to be able to do the US legislation. Um, I guess what do you guys think? So that they say, you know, what people are thinking about? Well, I think it's asking, isn't it the same problem for people? Yeah, I think well, one of the things is that it's very difficult something to do on the board with SBI to answer this question, because any answer that you sort of instruct in could be, you know, land or water. So since I'm not on water anymore, I can now tell you my personal views. It seems to me that if everyone wants to do this, and I think this is a good thing, that we should do it. And we should inform SBI that this is what we are doing, and we should tell them that, you know, obviously, no, SBI requirements of SBI are not what will be expected. And therefore, we also say that SBI are not what will be done. And if we, if then, you know, have to do that, then, you know, the SBI will present as well as the people. So if that's their legal advice, they should send as well as telling us to stop. Then, you know, I definitely wish to tell you that I love you. They don't pay me enough to be a lawyer. And I certainly would not give anything considerate as an official opinion on SBI without consulting our legal counsel, which I believe is underwriting this case. But I will note in passing that the bulk of the legal language in the U.S. relates to control exports to those, that short list of countries. It's not, it has never been clear to me personally, that I wasn't in any prohibition on taking things from contributors in those countries. And it's also completely clear to me that SBI exists not to be sole legal in my actual existence, specifically for definite, but rather to lend it for services within the U.S. and our system. So I think it's here on what is probably the key element here, which is whether, in fact, SBI is being asked to do anything on behalf of these situations and I'll stop there before I get myself in legal trouble. I would love to visit most of the countries that are on it, but it's by the way personal. And certainly whole life, not personal travel. We're ready yet. All SBI is going to have to do so far is answer the question for Nettie and Mr. Garth. And yeah, I'm going to stop there too. But we haven't been asked to actually take or veto any other action just by the advice of our department for us there. And we have taken it historically, they understand that it's not our job to tell our associated department what they should do or how they should hunt themselves. We can strain ourselves from shooting and the activities they ask us to engage in on their behalf are legal and within the confines of the tax code which we're organized. Any other questions? Okay, thank you very much for being here this morning, I think. All of us would be around for the rest of the conference. So please feel free to catch us, you know, always or something that you'd like to discuss. Please. And if you aren't already member code, you and most of your party become a member. If you are a contributing member and you're not voted in an election, please consider taking the time to do that. And I look forward to seeing all of our members and our CRO or beings as observers in the future. Thanks much.