Why we DO need a legal entity, why it must have "Fedora" in it's name and why it must be granted the trademark

[Christoph Wickert]

(Sorry for the longish subject, I hope I have your attention now.)

LinuxTag is over. I had to catch up a lot because I missed 4 days of
work and I didn't find the time to blog about it. Nevertheless I want to
share what I have learned as the primary event owner.

1. We need credit cards

We need credit cards or a reliable way to get money. I know of people
who are waiting for money for months and depending on the amount it can
be really bad. I paid for nearly all LinuxTag expenses, more than 2500
EUR. In addition to that I booked the hotel for Zoltan in Vienna,
another 310 EUR. On the other hand Max prepaid me 1000 EUR. Still this
means I had to prepay more than 1800 EUR.

Reimbursing people does not work when we are talking about these kind of
sums. Purchase orders don't work either, they take way to long and are
to unreliable, at least here in Germany. Thus we need credit cards.

2. We need a legal entity

But wait, credit cards will not solve our problems either because they
don't deal with liability. If I book a hotel, I am liable. We need a
legal entity to share the liability and to minimize the risks for the
individual contributors.

Some things cannot be paid with credit cards, they require a bank
account. A bank account again requires a legal entity.

And we need the legal entity not only for the expenses but also for
earnings. I ordered ambassador's polo shirts for more than 850 EUR. Some
of them are already 'sold' to our contributors, but others will be
delivered at FUDCon Milan, so it will take a while until I get my money.
I doubt that Community Architecture can take over the costs because how
would we pay them in return? Even if Comm Arch could receive payments
from contributors, could it in another fiscal quarter or even fiscal
year?

For this very reason we had the NPO: While my money is to work for me
and not for Fedora, the funds of the NPO are to enable Fedora
contributors to spread Fedora in a way that Comm Arch obviously cannot.

3. The legal entity must have "Fedora" in it's name

One of the requirements of the Red Hat Legal dept for continuing the
Fedora EMEA NPO was that it must change the name to something without
Fedora. But this doesn't work: When we sponsor the drinks in the project
area of LinuxTag, we want to make some good PR of it. This means we want
the poster to say "These drinks are brought to you by the Fedora
Project" instead of "These drinks are brought to you by yet another
Linux user group".

4. The NPO must be granted the Fedora trademark

Jared, do you remember when we were sitting at Rheinfelden and
brainstormed for cool swag like baseball caps, mugs, pins and all that?
On the same weekend we also closed down the NPO, but we failed to see
the consequences: All the cool swag we have been thinking of will never
happen.

Without an NPO we have to stick with cheap give-aways like buttons or
stickers because it will be hard to find somebody who can pay for the
production of expensive things like mugs or baseball caps. That person
basically has to sponsor the production because without the NPO we
cannot sell something, thus he never gets his money back.

And even if we had an NPO to produce and sell stuff, we cannot do Fedora
swag because this NPO would not be allowed to use the Fedora logo and
trademark.

Take a look at other projects, say Debian: They have quite a lot of
swag: Shirts, caps, ties, mugs, wine, books, ... Sometimes I wonder if
they still do Linux because they hardly have any media, but all this
swag helps them to raise money for their project. It's a pity we cannot
do the same and it is bad for both the Fedora Project and Red Hat.

I am looking forward to your suggestions how we can overcome this
problem.

Regards,
Christoph