[Members] Re: XSF EU Legal Structure: Example Proposals

Hallo Guus! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for your leadership on this issue. I'd like to tug on one thread below. On 3/4/26 6:01 AM, Guus der Kinderen wrote: Although in general I'm not a big believer in the concept of intellectual property [1] and that might be coloring my thoughts on this topic, I do wonder exactly what the threat model is regarding the protocol specifications that "we" define (right now "we" is the XSF, but in the future "we" could run something more like an open-source community, or to be pedantic an open-protocol community). Here are some possibile threats, with my comments on likelihood and potential damage. 1. Other organizations could fork our specs. Likelihood: low (I'm not aware of any such organizations) Damage: medium (I suppose it could be confusing to have multiple versions of the same protocol produced by different organizations) 2. Change control could be unclear. Likelihood: low (it seems to me that protocol developers would still want their specs to be published in the primary "repository" even if we don't have a legal organization behind that publishing location) Damage: medium (similar to #1 above) 3. The community could fragment. Likelihood: medium (if we no longer have an "official" place to do the work, then protocol developers might go off and define their own extensions ... but in fact we've had this situation for a long time with custom extensions defined by companies and open-source projects, and it's not clear to me that having a *legal* organization is necessary to solve this "problem" - if indeed it is a problem) Damage: medium (as noted, we've actually been dealing with this risk since the beginning and I think we've worked through it pretty well) Do folks disagree with my assessment of these threats, or are there other significant threats that I haven't listed here? Peter [1] https://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html