[Mageia-discuss] A suggestion regarding community organization.

Wed Sep 22 22:22:28 CEST 2010

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).
+
+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.
+
+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).
+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.
+3 - opportunities - Cooperatives have created a complete ecosystem for
+funding, educating, and assisting emerging institutions: there are
+international alliances such as the International Cooperative
+Alliance<http://www.ica.coop>,
+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.
+http://www.cdscotland.co.uk/).
+4 - it is a nonprofit organization by its own structure.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+There are a gazillion resources to help you guys organize into this model:
+we only need to adapt to it.
+
+Just my 2 cents.
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