Re: [DotGNU]Protection from legal harassment (was Re: DotGNU and business)

[Peter Minten]

Peter Minten wrote:
>
> I don't know about the requirments in other parts of the world for setting 
> up a corporate body (to give the owners legal protection) but here in 
> the Netherlands you need a 2 or more persons to set up the stuff and 
> I  believe there were some other requirments. Wouldn't it be best to
> provide a DotGNU corporation for this stuff (the folks needing 
> legal protection would probably qualify as employees anyway) since some of 
> us might not be able to start a corporation? I know bizplan died, but with 
> FreeDevelopers going down it could be useful to give the concept another 
> try.

I've been doing a little bit of thinking how a DotGNU corporation could work,
though these are these are probably very naive.

The idea is that we have a stock based corporation in which the FSF owns 51% 
of the stocks. The company is lead democratically by a steering comittee 
elected from the developers, this SC decides on issues using 'most votes 
win'. There is no one person in charge and the SC can always be recalled by 
the FSF, either because the FSF itself doesn't believe in the SC anymore or 
because of a significant number of developers not supporting the SC anymore. 
The important thing here is that the ultimate power (the FSF) has proven to 
be trustable.

When the company starts making profit a general reserve is filled and the 
shareholders get dividend. When the reserve is filled the profit is split 
between shareholders and employees.

As for the local laws issue, the company will fall under the laws of the 
country it is in so the local laws of everybodies countries wont be a big 
problem anymore. Of course we would need to pick the right country, the USA 
and the EU countries will probably turn into a patent minefield in the near 
future so these wont be very good options.

Well, that were my 2c on this matter.

Greetings,

Peter