money handling

[Bruce Perens]

Josh Berkus wrote:
> For the last three years, at least, SPI has been strictly a "sustain and support" organization for its projects.
Yes. But I have participated in an authorized political activity for SPI
before those three years: the W3C Patent Policy development.

The reason we haven't been doing anything but manage money for several
years is that it became obvious at the time that we were failing to
manage money. But we should not be in extremis mode forever.
> One needs only look at the recently slashdotted argument over the JVM in  Debian licensing to see that a large portion of the Debian community would react strongly against any political initiatives originating from SPI.
Not the software patenting one. I'm sure we have a plurality on that issue.
> The newer projects which joined probably also joined (I know PostgreSQL did) under the understanding that SPI was there to support but not direct.
They don't want SPI to direct their project. I don't think there is a
problem with SPI directing some common efforts on behalf of all of its
projects. Indeed, it couldn't operate without doing that.

    Thanks

    Bruce