Hackers, Community members:
As some of you already know, several important community assets are held
in the personal name of Marc Fournier for historical reasons. These
assets include several DNS domains (including postgresql.org), our SSL
key, and a Canadian trademark, and possibly a server as well in the future.
For years, we have had the issue that if anything happened to Marc,
getting control of these assets could be difficult and cause us weeks of
wasted time, and perhaps even result in www.postgresql.org being offline
for days or weeks. Even to date, we've had issues where problems have
happened while Marc was away and been unable to resolve them quickly.
We have, however, come up with a potential plan to change this. Marc
has agreed to transfer the community assets to a new Canadian nonprofit
which we set up for the purpose. The PostgreSQL Core Team supports this
solution, and as such I've been talking to Canadian attorneys about
setting up the NPO (we need an entity in Canada because of the
trademark). The Funds Group has approved spending SPI money to pay for
legal and operational fees for the corporation.
Of course, a Canadian nonprofit could also act as a regional
fundraiser/funder for events in Canada if anyone gets motivated to carry
this out.
For simplicity, the new NPO would initially be run by a small appointed
board, initially consisting of Marc Fournier, Dave Page, Chris Browne
and myself. We'd have a first board meeting after incorporation and
select additional/alternate board members at that time.
If someone gets motivated to build up Canadian community activity, the
membership of the NPO could be expanded in the future, and new board
members could be elected. Otherwise, the nonprofit could run under a
stewardship board indefinitely.
At this point, I am talking to attorneys about incorporation and bylaws.
So now is a very good time for anyone in the community to voice
questions, objections, ideas, concerns, or alternatives, now would be a
good time to present them.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com
