Why “fellowship”?

[MJ Ray]

"Heiki \"Repentinus\" Ojasild" <repentinus at fsfe.org>
> On 5 January 2012 14:36, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> > Before I start: http://fsfe.org/source/index.en.xhtml looks broken and
> > the contact page says to mention it here.
> Elaborate. Seems fine to me. It is certainly proper XML.

It isn't xhtml and doesn't include any details of how to download the
source code which is what I expected there.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://fsfe.org/source/index.en.xhtml

> > To all intents and purposes, a German association is a European
> > association because it is governed by EU law as well as German law and
> > I think members could join it from anywhere in the EU (maybe even the
> > world).
> True, but if all Fellows were members, hosting GAs would got out of hand.

I don't see why.  There are co-operatives with millions of members
that still hold useful general meetings, although I prefer dividing
into smaller units before you get to those numbers.

> > I feel that was a poor choice, as you can probably guess.  I am a
> > member of most of the things I work for at the moment.
> It is possible to join FSFE as a member too.

How, where? ;-)  The "Join" link is for the fellowship.

> > Not trusting future leaders with all aspects of our work is one reason
> > why people choose strong copyleft, GPL rather than BSD, so it seems a
> > bit odd that FSFE (like FSF) basically demands BSD-style surrendering
> > of control over the future uses of one's work.
> How, where?

It's more of a practice than a policy, but try to start with volunteer
work under any other terms than the existing, even when the existing
terms are not free software, and see how far you don't get.  This may
have changed in recent years but I'd seen no visible indication of it.

> > That seems rather opaque and neither democratic nor do-ocratic.  As
> > you may remember, I stopped volunteering when that approach did not
> > produce proper consideration of putting any FSFE web pages under a
> > free software licence.
> That seems rather honest. It works out to that one way or the other
> and acknowledging it is good. I agree with the licensing issue though.
> We are trying to handle it for software first. Take a look at trac.

Thank you for the information.  https://trac.fsfe.org shows an
invalid certificate - is that expected?

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/