[Qemu-devel] The QEMU project has joined Software Freedom Conservancy

[Peter Maydell]

I'm happy to be able to announce that the QEMU project
has joined Software Freedom Conservancy. This is something
we've been wanting to do for a while now (we've talked
about it at several previous QEMU Summit meetings).

Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit public charity
that provides financial and admin services to the various
Free Software and Open Source projects under its umbrella.

Conservancy membership gives us a structure and access
to various services:
 https://sfconservancy.org/members/services/
of which perhaps the most significant is having an
organization that can accept donations (such as the
payments to mentoring organizations in the Google Summer
of Code). Conservancy will also be able to hold project
assets like the qemu-project.org domain name for us.

As part of this, we've slightly formalized QEMU's
leadership structure, because Conservancy need to
know who's allowed to ask them to do something on behalf
of the project. So we've created the QEMU Leadership
Committee, whose initial members are Paolo Bonzini,
Andreas Färber, Alexander Graf, Stefan Hajnoczi, Mike Roth
and myself. Committee voting is by simple majority on all
decisions (including on who to add to or remove from the
Committee). There can't be more than two members employed
by the same company on the committee at once.

This doesn't mean any change in the general day-to-day
working of the project. I don't expect that we'll need to
take formal decisions on behalf of the project very often,
but now we have a mechanism for it.

People who like press releases can find the official
one from Conservancy here:
 http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/jul/23/qemu-joins/

I'd like to thank Stefan Hajnoczi in particular for doing
most of the legwork in getting this set up, and also
the folks at Conservancy.

-- PMM