Re: [Fsfe-uk] AFFS strategy (Was: Beyond bitching...)

[MJ Ray]

Graham Seaman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jason Clifford wrote:
> >Membership of AFFS is fairly meaningless of itself right now. It doesn't 
> >give AFFS a great deal of leverage as the membership is small and seems to 
> >exclude corporate membership - whether anyone likes it or not the 
> >government is not going to take AFFS seriously if it is seen as not being 
> >representative of commercial interests.

There's a problem with corporate voting members that we've
discussed in the past and never resolved: how can they
co-exist with individual members without causing double
representation of some people? (Isn't that what Usenetters
call sock-puppetry?) Corporations are slave legal entities that
people own, after all.

If we have non-voting corporate members, that avoids it, and we might
be able to use the same system to offer other membership types.

> I don't see that. The government is required to take academic experts
> seriously (at least nominally) in some areas.

This is true, but we are sort-of competing with organisations with
larger corporate funding. I'm not convinced that the low numbers of
companies funding AFFS is because there's no corporate membership.
Committee could tell us how many enquiries, attempts to join and
company donations have come in this month.

It may be a way in, though. Some of the government's relevant
panels have lots of commercial members and few community ones.

> [...] On the other hand, many members
> (AFAIK) are  part of  or own companies, so it is not as if the AFFS is
> stuck in an ivory tower...

Indeed, having corporate members and representing commercial
interests are quite not the same thing. I make money from
developing free software, for example.


-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/