4 Mar
2026
4 Mar
'26
11:01 p.m.
Hi everyone,
Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback! I'm really delighted to see that
we're making concrete steps on this. It's encouraging how the discussion is
shaping up.
Peter, I really appreciate the list of topics you suggested. I'll take
those pointers and add them to the suggested template for proposals on the
wiki, and I'll also try to apply them to the proposals I've already added
there.
Regarding the financial and administrative impact of setting up an EU legal
entity: from my experience with setting up a (very) small Dutch Stichting
(much smaller than Eclipse or even the XSF, without a bank account yet, but
with international board members), it was quite doable. Costs were low
enough that I was comfortable covering them out of pocket, so I'm hopeful
that the impact could be much less than what you described. I do not doubt
that we can easily make things very expensive, but maybe we can safely do
without many of the expensive bits.
Alex, I see your point, and it reminds me that, no matter which country we
choose, we'll always need to rely on and trust local representatives to
steer things correctly. In that sense, the move itself doesn't
fundamentally change the situation (as we currently already depend mostly
on one person for this, too). The main difference might be language
accessibility and available guidance: this could favor a country where
English is an official language for legal matters, or where authorities
provide key resources in English, even if it's not the primary language for
legal documents.
On the suggestion of working without a legal entity: I do have some concern
specifically around intellectual property. How would IP be handled in that
scenario?
As an aside, if we do pursue any kind of migration, do we need to
coordinate with Cisco regarding management of the Jabber trademark
agreement currently held by the XSF? That's something we may want to
clarify early on to avoid surprises.
Kind regards,
Guus
On Wed, Mar 4, 2026 at 12:19 PM Alexander Gnauck <gnauck(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Am 04.03.26 um 03:54 schrieb Peter Saint-Andre:
(4) which roles within the EU org could be filled
by volunteers (and who
is volunteering??) and which roles need to be outsourced to
professionals (e.g., bookkeeping service, accountants, lawyers,
auditors); this topic is related to (1) above because right now we
operate very inexpensively (no paid legal counsel, no accountants, no
bookkeepers, no required yearly auditing of the financial accounts,
etc.) and I don't know what the ongoing costs would be to operate in
various EU countries (e.g., would we need a paid financial audit every
year?) ... this stuff can add up fast!
I would like to volunteer and help here. But I have some concerns.
The proposals and research is really great. But with an org being in the
Netherlands there will be still the language barrier and NL legal stuff
most of us are not aware of.
Doing bookkeeping and filing taxes is even challenging in your own
country and native language. So my concern would be that we heavily will
rely here on our NL members or pay for services.
The same concerns would apply to any other EU country or the UK. The EU
still hasn't standardized any of this.
(and here's a deeper question: do we
need a formal organization at all or could we structure things in a more
lightweight manner with crowdfunding of conferences, ad-hoc donations
for particular initiatives, simple hosting of specifications in a
repository instead of having them be owned by an organization, etc.)
this is a
very interesting question and idea. Would be great when there
is a way to run the org without all the red tape and bureaucracy a legal
org entity put on us.
Alex