4 Mar
2026
4 Mar
'26
11:07 p.m.
Hi XSF,
dankjewel = thx
for sharing your experience, Guus.
I would prefer to keep it a legal entity, changing that to something
else could pose other obstacles not aware of before.
I agree with below points of Guus and offer my help in Case we will
chose a country with Dutch as legal language. As said, I am not a native
speaker of Dutch but fluent enough for also legal matters. I am a long
term member of the XSF and a even longer ;) term user of XMPP and active
in diverse XMPP meetups even though I am not actively developing XMPP
code as I would like to though.
eevvoor
On 3/4/26 3:01 PM, Guus der Kinderen wrote:
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
<mailto:gnauck@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