[Osmf-talk] Draft New Corporate Membership Tiers

[Steven Feldman]

Well said Frederik


______
Steven


> On 29 Apr 2016, at 08:11, osmf-talk-request at openstreetmap.org wrote:
> 
> From: Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org <mailto:frederik at remote.org>>
> Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] Draft New Corporate Membership Tiers
> Date: 29 April 2016 at 07:58:23 BST
> To: osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org <mailto:osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org>
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 04/29/2016 07:00 AM, Simon Poole wrote:
>> [...] in other words the single point of contact has been there as
>> long as it has been legally possible to talk with one voice. The
>> discussion now is about removing that (for the plebs)
> 
> This is perhaps a good point to remind everyone that the OSMF board does
> not intend to remove or diminish LWG. This is a straw man, and whoever
> put that up either suffered from a misunderstanding or from paranoia.
> 
> Let's try to turn this into a constructive discussion:
> 
> 1. OSMF/LWG have, in the past, shied away from giving too concrete legal
> advice. If someone came to us with a complicated "can I do this and
> that" question, we might have given them some hints but we always ended
> with "ultimately, we're not lawyers, and even if we were, we wouldn't be
> YOUR lawyers, so go and ask a lawyer before you proceed".
> 
> 2. Businesses are unhappy about this; they would much rather have us
> give them a yes-or-no answer which they could then rely on.
> 
> 3. We want to attract more businesses as corporate members so that our
> future is secured financially.
> 
> Now we can't really change #1; we can't vet a business model - not least
> because even if we have a certain interpretation of our own license, it
> might well be wrong! So we'll still keep saying to people "ultimately,
> ask a lawyer".
> 
> But what we *can* do is at least make it easier for the legal department
> of a business to assess the situation - make it easier for them to "ask
> a lawyer". It is still them who have to read and interpret the license
> and draw the right conclusions from it, but we can offer that *we* pay a
> lawyer to whom we explain the license and how we interpret it, and that
> lawyer can then talk to the business' legal department and explain
> things to them in words and terms that they can easily work with.
> 
> This is the "value add" that we essentially sell to corporate members:
> We retain a lawyer as a go-between between our own LWG and the legal
> department of whoever needs to interpret our license.
> 
> They don't get a different license because of that, or more committment
> from the OSMF, and they don't get their business model vetted. But they
> get the warm fuzzy feeling that they have someone on our side who speaks
> their language. They don't buy a privilege; they buy a translation
> service that might help avoid misunderstandings between what our normal
> project members in LWG say and their legal department. -- That doesn't
> make everyone else "the plebs", especially as someone without their own
> legal department will most likely prefer to talk to LWG than to talk to
> our lawyer ;)
> 
> Now speaking of misunderstandings, we (board) carry some responsibility
> for the "OMG board wants to scrap LWG" misunderstanding. The corporate
> membership tiers concept refers to a few things that aren't clearly
> specified and don't exist yet - e.g. the "business conference", the
> "general counsel", etc., and without further explanation it might sound
> like we have a drawer full of plans about what these things will be (we
> just don't tell you, har har har). Truth is, this whole thing is a draft
> that we're sharing early and we have *not* worked out the details yet.
> We heard that business users would like a business conference - so we
> pencilled one in. We heard that business users would like to be able to
> talk to a lawyer - so we added something to the draft. These things are
> certainly not impossible to do once the money is there to fund them. Who
> exactly briefs that lawyer and how, we haven't even designed.
> 
> Is it therefore careless to share such a draft early? Would you rather
> have us flesh out everything in detail and share when we have lined up a
> lawyer to contract and we're ready to take a vote?
> 
> Bye
> Frederik
> 
> -- 
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org <mailto:frederik at remote.org>  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
> 
> 

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