9 Mar
2018
9 Mar
'18
4:01 p.m.
Hi Patrick,
Ok, well if y'all change your minds on that it will take about 1 hour to
create an ERC20 smart contract to mint some LAT tokens and then it's up
to the community how much effort we put into an ICO. Payments for the
Tokens during the ICO can be handled in house relatively easily or with a
third party provider if necessary.
It could be a nice sideline for generating a stable source of funding
outside of the corporate structure and financial requirements of being a
member of the Linux Foundation and seeking funding from major sponsors or
simply asking the wider community to just donate cash/crypto with nothing
tangible in return. It seems these days good will doesn't get as much done
in the Linux Audio community as it used to.
To really take ownership of the funding issue the
Consortium can
undertake an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) by creating a Linux Audio Token
which can then be traded on the open crypto market.
Personally speaking, I would not support any cryptocurrency proposal. I
don't think it would enhance our credibility.
As for being independent from corporate interests,
it's corporates who
pay many if not most kernel developers, one way or another.
For the Linux Foundation the largest proportion of their liquid funds
comes from Membership fees. IIUC the minimum amount is $5k/per year. They
also offer some charitable assistance for Members who can't afford the
annual fees but you don't get to sit at the big peoples table and those
members are not the highest priority for a reasonably small and busy core
staff to look after.
I agree the Linux Foundation would be a good point of
contact, but
creating a registered non-profit in advance of initial discussions would
be premature, in my opinion.
It may be that the best option for us is direct affiliation with the
Linux Foundation, and a separate non-profit might impede that. The Linux
Foundation has related projects including realtime and embdedded, and
they have their own conference series of which LAC could potentially
become a part.
I suspect the LAC call for papers might not be reaching far outside our
existing community, and that we would benefit from papers from Linux
Foundation members. I'd be willing to bet that there are now a group of
engineers who work on Linux audio day-to-day and have never heard of LAC.
Cheers!
Daniel
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware