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

[Max Spevack]

On Sat, 21 May 2011, Christoph Wickert wrote:

> 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.

As I write this email, the only thing remaining for our community credit 
card initial trial in EMEA (Joerg), LATAM (Neville), and NA (John) is 
their signatures on a couple of documents, and then processing by our 
finance department.

For folks who don't remember earlier discussions, the purpose of these 
credit cards is to allow a community member in each region to be able to 
be a point of contact for whatever expenses come up that we *can* put on 
credit cards, and a receipt-wrangler.  Red Hat will pay the monthly 
bills, which will cut down on out of pocket expenses, and will also cut 
down on paypal transactions.

We'll still have to watch our overall budget and monthly limits, but 
this will eliminate a huge amount of overhead.

After a 3-card trial period, we'll probably expand the program with a 
couple of others, and additional global coverage.

I know that this only addresses a portion of Christoph's email, but this 
has been something that is long overdue, that I deserve the blame for in 
terms of it being stalled, but that I am happy to report should now be 
able to proceed very quickly.

I will work with all of these community volunteers to make sure that 
once they get their cards, the process of using them and reporting 
receipts back goes smoothly for everyone.

--Max