I’d suggest to open the text below as new wiki page and hereby ask an admin to change the post into a wiki type. The goal is to get a top-down documentation of the tryton foundation (as started with the marketing section last summer).
In the last days, I took the french Tryton statues and translated it to english and german (unfortunately, I’m not capable of spanish ;-). The reason was the resignations of Sergi and Wolf and my impression, that we suffer of communication problems and sometimes lack of understanding. The point we could start with is the statutes, because they are fix and free of personal opinions. I don’t know who read them already, but they are great. A lot of the suffering I read in the last days shouldn’t have occurred according to the statutes. So let’s make it better in the future. Here an Idea of the text and if it was possible to attach the statutes in the different languages directly here, it would be great. Where can I load them up?
Welcome to the Tryton Foundation
The Foundation aims to protect, promote and develop free software called “TRYTON” (Art. 4)
The Tryton Foundation does this as follows: (Art.4 )
the organization of conferences, symposia or any other event directly related to the protection, promotion and development of TRYTON free software, the collection of information or computer specifications allowing the improvement of the free software;
the organization of the community of supporters in order to best develop the free software “TRYTON”;
the management of all collaborative tools, including the IT equipment attached to the Foundatation such as the server, the domain name, etc.;
the management of the administration allowing the promotion and perpetuation of the registered trademark “TRYTON”.
Constituted on 2012-11-14 by seven persons, the foundation is run by a Board of seven Directors (Art. 5-14), assisted by the Council of Supporters (Art. 15-17). The Board mainly works as follows:
The Board acts to protect, promote and develop Tryton (Art. 5).
The Board elects a President and a least one Vice-President (Art. 5).
The Board of Directors meets whenever one of its directors deems it necessary and at least once a year (Art. 7).
The Board of Directors must meet if two/thirds of the supporters request it (Art. 8).
The Board discusses all points and decides by voting (Art. 9).
Of every Board meeting, minutes are written down (Art. 14).
Each year, the Board of Directors draws up a management report, including the minutes of the Board meetings held during the period in question (Art. 7).
The Board of Directors may entrust to a person for the daily management of the Foundation (Art. 11).
The following Board Directory actually are in charge (also see Tryton - Foundation)
The big issue I can see in the articles of incorporation is the distinction between authors and members. There are also users and customers who bypass the association and engage directly with certain authors (developers).
Authors of a software product are not always the members.
The rights of authors are set in the copyright law. Rights of members are written in articles of incorporation.
This is one area that many free software projects haven’t thought about carefully enough.
If you ask a lawyer about creating articles of association or a constitution for a group of people then most lawyers will not understand or think about the copyright issues at all. To create a proper articles of association for an open source product you need the help of a lawyer who understands both intellectual property law and also membership law.
The translation to English has some minor glitches. We don’t use the word statutes, that word is used in English for laws created by governments. For this type of group, we would call the document a Constitution , the Articles of Incorporation or the Articles of Association
Where you write “a protocol is written down”, we call the protocol the minutes of the meeting. Therefore, the text would be At every meeting, the minutes of the meeting are recorded in writing
In the aims, the first aim is to protect. Is that to protect the copyright or to protect the trademark or both? To protect the copyright, there is an implication that every author has granted/assigned their authorship rights to the association. In most free software projects, that is not the case, the authors do not get paid and we typically keep our copyright interest in a personal capacity. After an author dies, their copyright interest passes to their children, not to the association.
I do not understand the goal? Which should it be a wiki?
If you have questions about the articles of incorporation of the Foundation, you can just ask, me or @nicoe as founder could answer them.
I can tell you that we have been careful when writing this articles with our lawyer. We spend a lot of time explaining what was our intentions to our lawyer so he can write them correctly for Belgium laws.
In that case, the articles may need to be revised to be more explicit, for example, in a future version of the document, it could state “protect the rights of the individual authors”.
Sorry, but this statement is not relevent. Only entitled authors benefit from the license. Even FSF cannot enforce license on behalf of authors who don’t share copyright.
Transparency. Self service information. The supporters and new community members would like to know “how things work” beside developing. That helps the Board Staff and all the Supporters to get organized. The responsible staff can document how they do their job so the following staff can easily take over.
Less know-how drops off. It’s quite the same as you do as gatekeeper with the code, just with “organization-quality”
I just did the same with the board of an other club. It took us 18 months but now the club is up again all board members work hand in hand.
Who wants to know what? For me everything is already documented but I guess misunderstood because people did not read and come with a lot of assumptions.
All of us out there would like to know more. When two board members just leave and als mention why, we should care about. People would like to get welcome. One would like to get a fast overview about such a community. For example
On the website is declared who the directors of the board are. But who is responsible for what?
Where can I get an overview about the Foundation and how it is organized?
Where can I read what the Board is working on? Is there an Unconference in the pipeline? When are the Board meetings? When is the next Supporter Meeting?
What are the actual concerns of the Supporters and Community people?
How can I drop a subject into the Board so it gets discussed, so I get a qualified official response, based on the constitution, out of that Board (not a meaning of a specific person as I got last year while discussing marketing aspects). And consequently, I’d like to stay in contact with the Board concerning that issue.
Is there a strategy which functions it would be clever to focus on and how to realize them and how to get money for the corresponding development? I saw Cedric writing here and there he is looking for money, but I didn’t feel like there is a visible and for me understandable project management.
Who did great jobs lately?
Who of the Board is looking after the great people doing great work and says thank you? When does one say thank you? At the Unconference? Who does it?
Who sponsored basework on the modules and other new modules? Did the Foundation say thank you to them? Where all these hundreds of little success stories mentioned?
How exactly does the Foundation protect, promote and develop Tryton. What actions are taken at the moment beside developing, having the website tryton.org online, writing a newsletter and making posts on social media here and there?
How is the quality management working (not only concerning the code)? There are a lot of tasks to be done that need to be split on different shoulders, because it gets too much very fast. And because people like you guys out there are interested in this project, it won’t be a problem finding good people – as long as they enjoy the Foundations great esteem.
… and there is more.
Pleas don’t pick out just one point and tell me where to find a slice of answer. I know I could google around and find older and newer snippets here and there. I’m looking for a guided “entry point” for the people that want do go in depth (after checking the website). It’s about ergonomics.
The whole story is something the board might discuss first and then come back here. I guess I’m not the only one who sees these kind of “missed features” and I’d like to help making it better.
I think the level of communication is a board’s décision, if the Tryton Foundation doesn’t make noise it is because there no reason to make noise.
Was the code repository, the code copyrights and the Tryton brand at risk during the last year ? Not that I know.
So for me the Foundation made the job, thanks to Pokoli and the board.
Maybe, you would be interested in creating a kind of association around Tryton activities.
At France level, there are some ideas to organize local collaboration,. Most are business oriented and don’t plan to bend tryton standard in a specific direction.
We can learn from the experience of OCA around Odoo. We can discuss about pros and limitations of this type of association.
My input is not about making noise. Communication is just one little topic in the whole quality management. It’s about former Directors being frustrated of the organization of the Foundation. But yes, there need to be noise. Good and great noise about our fantastic project.
No, we have the Supporters and we have our Dev Team at tryton.cloud. That’ far enough
I’d like to strengthen the Foundation by making the board discussing certain things by also listening to the us outside the board (the supporters and other contributors - just because Cedric asked above) and help deciding a strategy and then let the people do their best to get great results. Secondly, the supporters can easily read somewhere how daily business is working here and might get a better understanding of certain thing (e.g. why Cedric is pushing so much on high quality code and therefore so often gets in conflict with other developers).
So my core argument is - without a minimum of transparency and quality management, we won’t reach such a goal. Therefore this simple Wiki, where the directors and supporters can describe how they do, what they do, was a good idea and I would appreciate the board as a whole would discuss that first and then say yes or no. Why? Because there would be a lot of Wiki pages - one for each subject of work. It will grow like a little tree. Ant the more it grows, the better and stronger its root become.
and my point is that the Tryton Foundation mission is not to do what you propose. It is not a steering committee of Tryton project. And this was done on purpose.
IIUC, some people are willing to federate some resources and organize them. I’m OK with that. it requires another organization, unformal or formal with for example membership, decision making instances, budget, processes, etc…
And this recommendation is uncompatible with the mission of the foundation. The foundation was created to prevent anyone to take full control of the project. Anyone means any contributor, any third party organization and any kind of group).
We must enforce that the fondation is not authorized to inluence Tryton project operations and is NOT the place where decisions are made.
I’m totally with you and never promoted a steering board. I don’t know what you mean by “mission of the foundation”. I just can read the official constitution. The Board has its duties as written on Art. 5. There is written much more than just react on “risk”. And when I read the posts of Sergi and Wolf - the Board seems not to be working and that was not in the interest of the Tryton Community. Perhaps this is not true, perhaps not. As lack of transparency one can’t really check it and that is one of the problems.
There is this third way between centralism and anarchism. It’s federalism including subsidiarity and this is working as you can see in some countries. I’d be glad to invite everybody to meet there. It would satisfy you by letting people free and helping people getting organized a bit.
Then the foundation is failing its goal because this is the current situation right now: A single person controls everything in the project. And it has been like this since the begining.
There is not so much done in the foundation but one of my main concers is that I wanted to do more and I wasn’t able to do it.
I think we converge.
Let me illustrate a typical case below.
We had here a discussion about domain names including “tryton”.
The foundation is charge of branding, both protecting the brand and promoting the brand because you cannot do one without the other. Someone could ask the foundation for a statement regarding tryton.community domain name, for example.
The reason why the foundation is not about federalism, is that the foundation is expected to stay as an independent instance regarding the initial commitments toward contributors. There are some countries where judges are elected, some where there are nominated for life, or both.
Correct - the foundation is not, but the whole Tryton organism is. And that’s why subsidiarity is the key to track down the work on different sublayers (supporters, community, authors, partners, sponsors, externals) and let them work as free as possible (by following the constitution and GPLv3 etc) and in peace.
Initially, Tryton was proposed by B2CK to live according to GPL rules, nothing less and nothing more.
But, per Odoo experience, we knew that GPL is not enough when an author owns the majority of the code. Why ? Because Odoo re-developped contributed parts of its code to take full ownership and make their own decision to modify the licence. This is what Foundation is here for.
Because this didn’t happen in 15 years, I think B2CK respected their commitment and the foundation is a success.
The case where people disagree was expected but no rule was set to manage the situation ( cleverly discussed).
At that time, I supported this because I think real life overtakes formal rules when people disagree.
In my opinion, if disagreement cannot be settled, the question for the community is either to preserve the unity of the project or to support a fork of the project.
So, in practice, real life is unfair : Because of past experience, I bet the only ones capable to fork Tryton to a new project today are B2CK. Therefore, I have no choice other than to accept B2CK way of life.
This doesn’t mean I don’t like others.
