WebM license third-party submission

[Simon Phipps]

For a variety of reasons of the sort that justify the use of private mailing lists, the Board hasn't gone into detail on the background to the corporate status episode, just publishing summary facts of the restoration of status. For the benefit of everyone here's the summary I posted on Slashdot to a similar question:

> The story here was that, much to the current Board's surprise, it turned out that accounts for some previous years (well in the past, in the early days of OSI) had been created but for some unknown reason not filed with the State of California and the IRS. The first the current Board knew of this was when we heard about the suspension. We immediately located the old accounts and arranged for them to be retrospectively filed, and in response the State lifted its suspension. While not desirable, we've since heard from many sources that this is an all-too-common event for all-volunteer organisations.
> 
> We believe everything is now up to date.  We (mainly OSI's Treasurer Danese Cooper actually) worked on these issues last year with the help of DLA Piper (law firm donating their service) and today we are completely in the good graces of both the IRS and the California State Franchise Tax Board.
> 
> If you are aware of other issues that haven't popped up on our radar, please tell osi (at) opensource (dot) org so we can fix them.

I suggest that any follow-up on this subject happen on license-discuss.

S.

On May 26, 2010, at 22:39, Chris DiBona wrote:

> (i hadn't included the questions about the corp as someone let me know what
> happened)
> 
> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Chris DiBona <cdibona at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Please hold off on submitting this while we determine certain compatibility
>> issues internally at google. We'll engage with osi in a couple of weeks,
>> likely as not.  I would also point out that we're uncomfortable with make
>> licesne proliferation worse and in the event we do submit it, we will want
>> a
>> couple of changes to how OSI does licenses.
>> 
>> 1) We will want a label explicitly deterring the use of the license.
>> 2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We
>> are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
>> 3) We need to know OSI's current corporate status. I heard that osi was a
>> california corporation again, but I would like to know, from the group,
>> that
>> this is true for 2010 and that there aren't any issues there.
>> 
>> This might sound stridant, but I think that OSI needs to be more open about
>> its workings to retain credibility in the space.
>> 
>> Chris
>> 
>> --
>> Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
>> Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com
>> Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
> Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com
> Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com