wxWindows Software Foundation and Copyright Assignment FAQ

wxWindows Software Foundation FAQ

Foundation FAQ

Contents:


Why is the Foundation needed?

There are two answers to this question: the first, official one, follows:

As wxWidgets grows in popularity, and more and more large organisations start to rely on it, it becomes more apparent that we need better representation. The Foundation provides a legal entity to represent wxWidgets and protect it from possible predators: the recent attack on Linux intellectual property has shown that this is not a trivial threat. Also, by forming the Foundation, we're making a statement that wxWidgets is here to stay, it has important allies, and it takes its responsibilities seriously. We hope to provide a forum for organisations to interact with the project, attracting funding and partnership to help wxWidgets grow and adapt to changes in the world of application development.

However I (VZ) was personally more moved by the answer to this question on wx-dev mailing list by Hajo Kirchhoff:

The foundation is a legal neccessity, creating a single legal body to represent wxWidgets. Like creating an Avatar for a massive multiuser strategy game called "US law system".

Indeed, this is much more succinct but describes the idea of the Foundation very well: in case of any legal action (such as stopping wxWidgets copyright violation by others), we must have a legal representation ("Avatar") just in order to be able to play [the legal games]. This doesn't ensure that we win, but without such legal presence we have no chance whatsoever.

What is the Foundation going to change?

Although there's a board of directors bringing a little formality to strategic decisions, the basic day-to-day operation and ethos of the project will not change much, if at all.

What are the goals of the Foundation?

The main goals of this not-for-profit organisation are to protect, enhance and promote the existing code base, and to provide a forum for industry to interact with the developers and supporters of wxWidgets.

What is the structure of the Foundation?

Currently there is a board of directors with four members:

Chairman: Mitch Kapor (OSAF)
Director: Julian Smart (wxWidgets)
Director: Vadim Zeitlin (wxWidgets)
Director: Stefan Csomor (wxWidgets)

The board will meet in person about once every year, with more frequent conference calls throughout the year.

The board is biassed to have a majority of members from the wxWidgets development team, to avoid any prospect of the imposition of decisions upon the development comomunity.

How will the needs and opinions of users and contributors be represented?

At present, to keep the initial Foundation formation simple, we envisage a relatively informal arrangement whereby the board will test opinion on the wxWidgets mailing lists and discuss options, as we have with any decisions in the past. We will also consider how we could implement a membership organisation with voting. Opinions about this are very welcome.

We are also considering setting up a Technical Advisory Board, where we invite experts from a range of organisations to contribute.

Could the Foundation be hijacked by commercial interests?

It's hard to see how, especially in view of the restrictions on licence changes, and the fact that the board will always have a majority of its directors from the wxWidgets development community. It's also plain that wxWidgets couldn't work as anything but an open source project, so there would be no point in trying to hijack it. Of course, support from companies is to be welcomed, so long as the open source philosophy is clearly understood.