[Mageia-discuss] Financial questions

Tue Sep 21 04:21:43 CEST 2010

Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 21:38 -0400, Pierre Pmithrandir a écrit :
+> Hello
+> 
+> My question is quite simple. 
+> In the list of contributors, we can see a lot of former mandriva
+> employee name.
+> They were employed by mandriva(or edge it) to create a distro.
+
+No mostly edge-it. Mandriva people are still employed.
+
+>  Now, they have no job, so a lot of time, and they would like to
+> continue this adventure. I can understand it. 
+> I have some questions about that : 
+>  - Is it legal for you, have you some right to work in the same field
+> than your previous employer ? Lot of contract have a clause to forbid
+> that. It would be a very bad news if mandriva asked some question
+> about that and stop the project.
+
+They cannot prevent this. In order to have a non-concurrence clause in
+France, it need to be 
+
+1) limited in time
+2) limited in scope
+3) limited geographically
+4) paid
+5) and realistic
+
+Ie, you can tell "I give you 30% of your pay each month so you do not do
+work in the firewalling domain for 1 year in paris, Lyon and
+Lille" ( real clause that was offered to a friend of mine ).
+
+You cannot say "I give you 1 euro so you never work in computer field
+for the rest of your life anywhere on the planet".
+
+Oh, and of course, since Edge-it disappeared, there is no one to pay
+anything to forbid anything, hence no issue with such clause.
+
+>  - Have you some financial plan to survive. Now you have maybe some
+> money from government, and again a lot of time, but if you find a job,
+> how many time would you take for the distro. 
+
+Well, I cannot tell the details for them, but they do have plans, yes.
+And for the non ex-employee, I guess most of us have regular jobs.
+
+>  - People seems to think that Mageia would never have employees, is
+> that true ? Could you imagine to create a structure and month after
+> month, hire the main contributors to prevent Mageia to be out of
+> developer soon ?
+
+Technically, a association can have employees. Bigger one does, for
+administrative task first, and various task later. Regarding the hiring
+of main developers, I must remind that most of them already have a job
+( ie, all of the external mandriva contributers ).
+
+What a french association cannot be is for profit ( except in
+Alsace/Moselle, where the law is different, seek 'association loi 1910'
+on the web if you speak french and if you are interested ). 
+
+>  - You seems to think that it will be a free distro, but do you plan
+> for some cashable services ? If a company ask your support, would you
+> refuse and ask them to go to mandriva, or do you want to create
+> something for that ?
+
+As I said, there is various plans in the pipe, and yes, the distro will
+be free. 
+
+However, if a company ask for support, there is way that do not involve
+anything , with stuff like "auto entreprenariat", or "portage
+salarial" ( I do not know the details, you should consult a specialist
+or do some research on the net if you wish to have more information,
+this is the limit of my knowledge )
+
+> Are you really motivated to do the same job than before, but without
+> being paid ?  Are you ok to give this work for free to your previous
+> employer(it's GPL...)
+
+Again, I cannot answer for them, bu given the fact we usually give it
+for free for people that may have moral values not really aligned with
+ours, I think the question is already answered since the first day we
+started to do free software.
+
+> My questions are most about money, I know that is a subject that
+> people love to forget, but I'm sure that it's a very important part
+> when you want to create a budget, and I didn't get any information
+> about that.
+
+Well, maybe because the announce was like 3 days ago ? 
+
+> By the way, a forum would be very nice to prevent our mailbox from
+> quick die :-)
+
+Well, a forum will just make zarb.org servers die ( where the website is
+hosted at the moment, and where I am member of the admin team ), so do
+not take this personally, but I prefer for the moment to make hotmail
+suffer more than zarb.org :)
+
+Not to mention that a forum will require some maintenance ( moderation,
+spam cleaning, upgrade of the software when needed, watching it grow ),
+and there is more urgent matter like having something to discuss before
+having somewhere to discuss. We didn't really anticipated the rush of
+people on the ml so we are trying to manage this properly while not
+sacrificing proper hygiene and sleeping habits.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+