On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 08:46:31PM -0500, Martin Owens wrote:
What if we moved from "more than one member employed" to "more than 1/3" or "more than 40%"? Would that give the Committee enough wiggle room going forward?
Probably should speak in fractions of sevenths, otherwise rounding is ambiguous. A hard limit of 3/7th would avoid majority control by any one employer while being flexible with membership.
Shouldn't it only really count if there are activities being performed on behalf of the company involved? Canonical and I doubt samsung probably never paid any time to inkscape development or management for any of their hires. And in that way Bryce et al are not hired by those companies on this project, but are self-hired.
I thought about that too, but I could imagine a case where if your employer had a commercial interest in $badthing, as an employee you might feel compelled to support it in voting, regardless of whether you were directly working on it or not, perhaps even regardless of your own personal opinion. After all, there do exist companies where publically expressing views counter to the company's position can be career-limiting or at least awkward...
For example I work for BasisTech on inkscape, a handful of hours a year as a contractor. Two BasisTech people on the board could be a problem. But I also have done work for the FSF, RedHat and a ton of others who never asked me to work on inkscape. For us contractors, we could quite quickly hit any number of limits if /any/ employment relationship counted. Some sort of declaration for board members about who they work on inkscape for (if any) in their board profiles would make that information transparent too.
Right, frankly for most of us, our Inkscape involvement is going to span multiple employers. I really doubt there's going to be much chance at all of any of us pushing corporate agendas. I trust that for the existing board members, even if all seven of us shared an employer I doubt it'd make much difference in our votes or activities.
But it's entirely possible that several dark horse candidates with employer loyalty conflicts of interests get nominated for board elections. I would like to trust the community would suss that out. I doubt the community would accidentally put bad actors onto the board. But if they do, having a hard limit could prove a useful check.
Bryce