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