Before I start: http://fsfe.org/source/index.en.xhtml looks broken and the contact page says to mention it here.
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org
There are two topics:
- There is no European association. That is bad, because else FSFE would have choosen that one. As this is not possible, we set up a German association.
To all intents and purposes, a German association is a European association because it is governed by EU law as well as German law and I think members could join it from anywhere in the EU (maybe even the world).
Even when a European corporate form exists, like SCE, you still have to choose somewhere as its residence.
- Fellows not being members. It was a choice when we set up the Fellowship to have Fellows as non-members. Like most of the people doing work for FSFE are non-members.
I feel that was a poor choice, as you can probably guess. I am a member of most of the things I work for at the moment.
Not trusting future leaders with all aspects of our work is one reason why people choose strong copyleft, GPL rather than BSD, so it seems a bit odd that FSFE (like FSF) basically demands BSD-style surrendering of control over the future uses of one's work.
After some time we wanted to give the Fellows more legal power in our constitution, so we introduced the Fellowship seats in the GA, which Fellows can vote.
That was a good move.
(Of course one of the most powerful ways to influence FSFE is still to just do the work as a volunteer and to contact us on matters, and discuss with us.)
That seems rather opaque and neither democratic nor do-ocratic. As you may remember, I stopped volunteering when that approach did not produce proper consideration of putting any FSFE web pages under a free software licence.
Regards,