[Ambassadors] Re: What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Robert Scheck]

Hello Max,

On Tue, 09 Dec 2008, Max Spevack wrote:
> (2) I never understood why the membership fees are anything other than  
> nominal.  The purpose of a legal entity like Fedora EMEA e.V. is *not*  
> to collect money from Fedora contributors, but to serve as a legal  
> entity that can hold onto resources from Red Hat (freeing us from having  
> to spend resources in a 3-month window or watching them vanish) as well  
> as to hold resources from other organizations that want to contribute  
> directly to Fedora without having to contribute to Red Hat.

the scheme for the membership fees was suggested by Gerold when he was
using the statutes from his Linux Usergroup Loerrach as base. AFAIK we all
agreed completely and closed to that paragraph inside the statutes when
founding Fedora EMEA on FOSDEM 2008. This moves the issue not to Gerold,
but to all of the foundation members, if we want to blame somebody - which
is not my indention. We (the foundation members) _maybe_ didn't think about
it enough when deciding that.

It looks like I'm one of the few people talking about the amount of the
membership fees - when listening to the voices around, the common feedback
is, that the membership fee is just too heavy. The voices are coming from
Fedora EMEA e.V. members and from non-members and I'm not naming somebody
here, looks like Fedora contributors and NPO members are somehow a bit shy
regarding that... ;-)

My personal result after that heavy discussion the last few days is, that I
definately want to see a *real* discussion including a possible change of
the membership fees on the next general member meeting of Fedora EMEA e.V.
So please put that on the agenda when sending the next invitations for such
a cometogether.

And as Max said, Fedora EMEA e.V. does not want to collect money from the
Fedora contributors already spending their time, so I can't see any barrier
why we should not change the membership fee in order to make more people
happy and getting a member of Fedora EMEA e.V. Please note, that according
to the statutes, the membership fee needs to be a number with the base of
two (but it's AFAIK open whether Euro or Cent), so 128 Euro are possible
same as 10,24 Euro (because of 1024 Cent). With a bit of mathematics we can
nearly deal every lower membership fee (if we want that) without changing
the statutes itself, I would assume and say.

Please note: According to our statutes, two third (2/3) are needed to
change the membership fees, so that should be 10 out of 15 people in total.
If we're less than the half of all members, that would be 7 people, the
decision has to be moved on to the next general member meeting, so our
statutes say. There also should be no petition needed as we don't change
our statutes itself, but maybe just the membership fees managed in separate
document. If any petition or request is anyway needed, see that as offical
request for it.

Finally of this e-mail speaking for myself: I don't want to get reimbursed
for my membership fee, my issue is not the height itself, but what with the
money happens more or less - which Max nicely explained in another e-mail.
I'll surely write an reply there as well, currently I'm trying to get the
echo (~ 300 mails) for my initial e-mail read and answered... ;-)


Greetings,
  Robert