Summary of the 20 July 2010 meeting of the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors
Full IRC meeting logs are posted at BoardOfDirectors/IrcLogs/2010/07-20.
Board Member Attendance
- Present: Eric Anholt, Donnie Berkholz, Alan Coopersmith, Alex Deucher, Matthieu Herrb, Matthias Hopf, Keith Packard
- Absent: Bart Massey
Discussion & Decisions
501(3)c Conversion
Alex thanked the board members for providing the required information about themselves for the 501(c)3 paperwork and reported the IRS Form 1023 was almost done. Karen, our SFLC lawyer, sent him a draft to review, and they were scheduled to meet to discuss the next week. They are also looking into whether we owe back taxes or not.
XDS 2010
Matthieu asked if anyone had heard back from companies we'd asked to sponsor XDS events/refreshments - no one had anything concrete to report yet. (Contact Matthieu if you would like a copy of the flier to present to a potential sponsor or if you would like to be a sponsor.)
Matthieu asked if the Board wanted to pick up the tab for the social event if no company steps forward. The estimated cost is EUR 1500 for 50 people, but only 33 people have signed up on the XDS 2010 Attendees List, including 19 marked as "tentative".
Open Group licenses
Alan mentioned that he had done some investigation into the Open Group licenses for the X Window System and the X Test Suite, including mail to past board members that went to the board mailing list, but had not yet contacted the Open Group itself.
MIT hosted machines
Jim Gettys had asked the board via e-mail for space on an X.Org machine to store some old archived materials of the X Consortium. The board members all agreed that the resolution reached via e-mail to provide space on expo.x.org, one of the machines hosted at MIT was fine.
This led to discussion of the MIT hosted machines. Eric asked about the status of backups for those machines - no one present was aware of backups being done, but many members agreed that it is important to have them backed up and reasonable to pay MIT for backups in addition to the other hosting services we pay them for. Keith reported that the past invoices covered rack space, power and bandwidth, but not backup. The question was raised of the value of continuing to host machines at both MIT & PSU. It was suggested that since we do little in the way of replication or failover between the two sites, having two sites is currently costing more overhead than the perceived benefits. Several of the machines hosted at MIT were donated to MIT for use by X.Org due to donor's restrictions on donating to educational institutions vs. industry groups, so could not be moved to PSU and would have to be given to MIT for their use, but those machines are now 5 years old or older.
Since the meeting had gone past the hour, the board tabled the discussion of whether to keep or leave the MIT hosting for further thought and input via e-mail before the next meeting.