[Cryptech Core] linux foundation proposal

[Phil Roberts]

Hi folks,

at the recent face-to-face in Stockholm we discussed the need to move the administrative ownership of the CrypTech project from Nordunet to a new home.  That discussion is documented in the meeting notes here: https://tid.isoc.org/pad/p/cryptech-2018-feb-stockholmagenda <https://tid.isoc.org/pad/p/cryptech-2018-feb-stockholmagenda>.

I volunteered to raise this possibility with the Linux Foundation at their Global Leadership Summit which I was planning to attend.  I met Mike Dolan there and started discussions about the possibility of doing this.  Mike, Leif, and I had a phone call following up that meeting and Mike presented the high-level requirements from the Linux Foundation for them to become a home to a project. They are interested and willing to become the home of the CrypTech project going forward.

The CrypTech business team has reviewed the requirements and recommends that we seek to become a supported project under the Linux Foundation.

The benefits of us to having them as the long term home are:
- the Linux Foundation does this kind of thing.  It hosts a large number of open source projects as part of its portfolio.
- they provide IPR and liability protection
- they will be able to accommodate our existing development team
- they will handle all accounting
- they have some brand recognition which may help with visibility of CrypTech
- their requirements are not overly complicated

They do have some requirements that will cause us to add some formality to our existing processes.  We believe these are acceptable.
- the project needs a charter (there is a draft template of one attached here, which has the following bits included)
- a formal technical steering committee (I think this would be the CrypTech core team)
- identified group of “committers” (these are folks who can make commits to the code base - I believe this is the group of existing developers [Rob, Paul, Pavel, Fredrik, Joachim]
- hold everything under an OSI-approved license (our existing license is fine for this)
- when code is contributed it must be accompanied by a developer certificate of origin where the contributor signs off that they intend to abide by the license (I don’t think we have anything like this? but I think it sounds ok.)


Please note that there is cost associated with becoming a supported project under the Linux Foundation.  Their administration fees are 9% of the first $1million USD contributed to a project and 6% of every dollar after that.

I believe the next steps for this are:
- circulate this email with the core team
- gather any outstanding questions people have and get them answered by the Linux Foundation
- decide whether this is the way we want to proceed with the project

What do you think?

Regards,
Phil


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cryptech.is/archives/core/attachments/20180517/38c32832/attachment-0003.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Technical Charter (Custom) -- LF Projects, LLC 2-22-2018 FINAL.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 40397 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cryptech.is/archives/core/attachments/20180517/38c32832/attachment-0002.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cryptech.is/archives/core/attachments/20180517/38c32832/attachment-0004.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Participation Agreement and Funding Charter 3-22-2018 FINAL.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 79241 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cryptech.is/archives/core/attachments/20180517/38c32832/attachment-0003.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cryptech.is/archives/core/attachments/20180517/38c32832/attachment-0005.html>