man_of_mr_e wrote:My argument is that, instead of upheaving the entire community with a fork, wouldn't it have been easier to simply join the foundation, call for an election, and vote in the people you want? Instead, there is this war of rhetoric and half-truths being waged, not to mention outright warping of the stated facts.
I am a new member whose interests and income are both tied to having to have confidence in the CMS I use. I have read almost all the posts on all threads since the announcement by the core dev team.
The person above, for whatever reason, is defending the MF perspective, which isn't a bad thing since it appears that the future of this community and its collaborative products are deeply committed to the open source philosophy and the most innovative cms will come from here. I would like to see the rhetoric stop, and it seems to come from the MF side, for example:
FEES: The fact that fees would be charged for membership levels was not communicated until the Foundation seemed legally safe to deliver this contentious news, which is just unprofessional. All the other free services of this magnitude give long notice to the users that the choice to join and benefit from paying a fee is in the works.
I have two direct questions. As far as I am concerned they must be answered honestly or MF is conducting a corporate takeover rather than starting a Foundation.
MAKEUP OF THE BOARD: I read the information in MF as soon as it was posted yesterday, apparently the Board is already made up for the first year (until the opportunity to vote, by those who have been accepted as active members, which is subject to the self-appointed Board's approval).
Direct Question1: Has the 21-day notice event passed and this a done deal for a year? If not, do I get a notice if I am an ordinary member and do I get to vote for the initial board if I am an ordinary member?
Direct Question1: if someone replies can they state their reply is legally correct based on this? http://mambo-foundation.org/images/stor ... iation.pdf
excerpt:
"Active members are required to be an Ordinary member first, and nominated by another Active member for approval by the Board. "
By this, a Board already has to exist, but a board could have been determined after advance discussion and general polls than in the coup fashion. Even if the majority poll opinions were not the determining factor, the potential members would be introduced to the community in advance and confidence inspired that the choices were based on logic and the open source philosophy. A mission statement could also be discussed in a forum, and benefit from the intelligence of the community rather than impolitely ignore that resource.
Would there be anything inappropriate in allowing the members of the Mambo community at least express opinions in advance on the formation of the foundation created to manage them and the free contributions they make, or the extensions they sell or the clients the bring? (Or that one really dedicated and multi-talented person with 40,000 email aliases)
I do not find the moderators of this forum to be indirect or discreet without due reason, where the fees and board membership discussions about MF were not legal issues, they were power issues. That is an important difference in the ways these two entities are behaving.
The most similar situation I can think of is the missionaries who used to tell the locals that they were going to impose order for the good of the community - by force if need be. And next came the taxes collected by the self-appointed leaders. The community would have relocated then, too, had they the opportunity.
