The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 17 Dec) at 20:00 UTC. As it says in the meeting announcement, none of the officers have prepared their reports in advance and there are no proposed actions, so I guess it’ll be a very short meeting. Disappointing.
Watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.
Actually, Michael Schultheiss posted his Treasurer’s report to spi-private at 15:58 on Monday, December 15th, US Eastern Time (UTC-5). I haven’t had a chance to get it into the agenda yet; I am about to do it now, which caused me to notice your blog post.
Hi MJ, I’ve been meaning to apply to become a member of SPI, and when I saw your post today at Planet Debian, I decided to go for it. I went to the website and can’t find a “join” link anywhere. Is donating the same as joining? I seem to remember you posting something about how it was only $25 to join. Did I mis-read a post? Thanks for any information you might have.
Oh yeah I also wanted to ask you if you would consider using PBooks for bookkeeping if I changed the license to GPLv2, Apache, or something else you might recommend.
Thanks again.
@Jimmy – oh, right. I thought that was November’s report. Sorry for getting confused.
@Albert – No, donating isn’t the same as joining. https://members.spi-inc.org/newnm.php should get you straight to the joining page (give or take some web browser security theatre about a CACert SSL certificate) – adding a more obvious “Join” link is near the top of my list of things to do whenever they let me edit the website. It’s not $25 to join (but $25 donation would always be welcome) but contributing (voting) membership is only open to free software developers (including programmers, translators, packagers, …). Anyone can join as an associate member, though.
I think I looked at PBooks a while ago. I’d consider it in April for myself if it was GPLv2, Apache, or something else unambiguously free software. I’m currently using a minor update of SQL-Ledger which is on my personal website somewhere, but it’s a MzScheme+CVS stuff pain to install just now. I don’t know if SPI would consider PBooks and I’m not sure if you were asking about that or TTLLP.
SPI has its own certificate authority and doesn’t use CACert. For Debian etch or later, as well as most systems derived from those such as recent Ubuntu versions, our CA certificate can be found in /etc/ssl/certs/ if you have the ca-certificates package installed. It is also available here:
http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/spi-cacert.crt
The fingerprints for that, signed by SPI hostmaster Joerg Jaspert and connected through him to the strongly connected set of the OpenPGP web of trust, are here:
http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/spi-cacert.fingerprint.txt/view
If you take the trouble to verify the signature against the web of trust (or some other trustworthy source like the Debian keyring) to whatever level of certainty meets your trust needs, and make sure the actual CA cert has the same fingerprints as the signed fingerprint file, then you are getting more than just security theatre. In any case, I look forward to the less alarmist SSL certificate warning dialog that is rumored to be in Firefox/Iceweasel 3.1.
Meeting log is at http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2008-December/002658.html