Re: [Bacula-devel] Donation administration

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

On Monday 12 June 2006 23:54, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> Kern Sibbald writes:
> > simple to do.  To open a bank account, I need only a set of articles of
> > association, which define the objective of the association and the
> > persons who are the directors of the association.  These articles of
> > association can also include any special considerations, such as
> > restrictions, who can be members, ...  Certain documents for the bank
> > account will be in French since that is the official language here. 
> > However, the articles of association will be written in English.
>
> What would be required for those to join?

I believe that everyone should be equal, something terribly lacking in this 
world at the moment.  However, the articles of association are somewhat like 
the articles of incorporation. They must spell out who governs the 
association and how those persons get into their possitions.  This most 
likely means that members of this association must be elected by either a 
board or by a members meeting.  If I am not mistaken, Debian and Apache have 
clauses similar to this.

>
> > I intend to create these articles of association for Bacula, which is the
> > reason I am writing this email.  I can, of course, do it myself, but I
> > would much rather have the participation and input of the Bacula users.
>
> Hm... no examples that coul be found on the web I would think you may be
> able to find samples on small business sites in your country.

This is not a business in a commercial sense, and I prefer to keep it in 
English rather than French.  All such articles that will be officially 
registered in the commercial registry must be in French.  The Netherlands is 
the only country that permits such articles in English.  So I don't intend to 
register the association with the commercial registry.  This is perfectly OK 
in Switzerland.

I suspect that there are plenty of such articles of association on the web, 
but they are usually articles of foundation for a foundation such as for 
Apache, Python, ...  Though they are not exactly what I want, they will most 
likely have the essential elements definining how they are governed, ...

> These types of things are very, very country specific. You also need to see
> if there are any restrictions as to who can be part of the association.

Yes, these things are very country specific, but Switzerland doesn't stick its 
nose into private affairs as much as other countries. The laws are pretty 
specific for corporations, but for associations, there are almost no 
restrictions. They just define what is needed to create an association. This 
is no problem as I am *very* famaliar with these kinds of Swiss laws 
(unfortunately).

>
> > examples of such documents that already exist for Open Source projects.
>
> But wouldn't these be legal documents pertinent to the country of the
> assocation? Are those samples for other open source projects in your
> country?

As I mentioned, for associations (as opposed to corporations), the laws here 
are not very restrictive.  There may be samples of other open source projects 
in Switzerland, and I will look, but I doubt there are many if any, and I am 
more interested in what Bacula users want.  I expect that this association 
will decide how the money donated to Bacula is spent, and will probably hold 
the copyright to the code, so at least in some small measure, everyone should 
have a bit of interest in this.

I'll get back to everyone in about a week with a few more details about what 
the requirements are and what I suggest.

-- 
Best regards,

Kern

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