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Hi, I'm Gamaliel Lamboy. I am a student of Economics at Puerto Rico University, with a minor concentration in Cooperativism. I was truly impressed by your efforts to fork Mandriva Linux into a full community-based operating system, and I fully advocate it. I look forward to contributing, although probably not in coding (I am no programmer), to the community in various ways, including promoting it among my academic and personal environment (I have been getting people on Linux for a good amount of time now, and would certainly move them to Mageia ASAP).<br>
<br>Regarding the future plans, I was thinking that you could consider becoming a cooperative, since it upholds most of the values behind free software by itself, is a community enterprise, and -being an established movement- has an enormous amount of financial resources available to its development. It is offered simply a means to fund the community, not a community in itself. I will brief a bit why I think this is a good choice, but in the end it's the community's choice what should reign, and I will support it whichever way I can (I'm unemployed right now) regardless of their choice.<br>
<br>1 - collective capital. That means the project will never be individually owned or become a free rider inside a corporation's umbrella. More importantly, it ensures democracy in the decisions due to joint ownership (there is a whole standardized structure to ensure democracy and full excercise of joint ownership inside cooperatives).<br>
2 - transparency. Cooperatives and Linux believe in openness, which in Linux means anybody can use, modify and redistribute particular works. A similar thing happens in cooperatives; every associate holds the institution accountable for the safe management of their funding, which means that all accountings and dealings must be openly communicated to all members.<br>
3 - opportunities - Cooperatives have created a complete ecosystem for funding, educating, and assisting emerging institutions: there are international alliances such as the <a href="http://www.ica.coop" target="_blank">International Cooperative Alliance</a>, thousands of national-scale organizations, cooperative banks, and virtually almost any kind of service possible. By choosing to create a cooperative, we would not necessarily need to rely on our own capital, but we could finance our initial investments through cooperatives specially dedicated for the development of these community enterprises. (e.g. <a href="http://www.cdscotland.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.cdscotland.co.uk/</a>).<br>
4 - it is a nonprofit organization by its own structure.<br><br>My idea is that we create a software cooperative that is dedicated to funding Mageia Linux through various digital and cooperative means. The cooperative would contribute to Mageia, and Mageia would contribute back to the community. That's the general plan, but I can make more specific statements and answers to queries if needed/wanted.<br>
<br>Anyway, the most important thing is, it's a means to help the entire Linux community grow. The definition of cooperative says much more than my blabbering: "A co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united
voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs
and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled
enterprise." It's close enough to what you guys are doing.<br><br>There are a gazillion resources to help you guys organize into this model: we only need to adapt to it.<br><br>Just my 2 cents.<br>
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