F-Si Statute

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Art. 1

The “Free Silicon Foundation”, referred in the following as "Association” is an association in the sense of Article 60 of the Swiss civil code [1]. The official domain and email of the Association are f-si.org and mail@f-si.org.

Art. 2: Purpose

The purpose of the Association is to promote free silicon. The term “free” is understood in the sense of free as in freedom or free as in “free software” as defined by the Free Software Foundation [2] and by the GNU Project [3]. More specifically, the Association has the scope of promoting:

  1. Free and Open Source (FOS) CAD tools for designing integrated circuits
  2. the sharing of hardware designs
  3. the use of common standards, or their creation when strictly necessary
  4. the freedom of users in the context of silicon technology

The Association welcomes different approaches, paradigms and communities. It fosters the alignment and merging of developing efforts, and encourages cooperation of teams.

The Association discourages the use of permissive software and hardware licenses such as the BSD license or the solderpad license [4]. These licenses permit entities to close the source code, or more generally the documentation, which has been publicly available, therefore conflicting with the principles of the Association, and in particular with the mission of fostering community building.

The Association does not accept donations or support from entities or companies which have a mission or a behaviour which conflicts with the principles aforementioned. These include entities or companies which actively discourage copyleft licenses, and eventually promote and encourage permissive licenses. Anonymous donations and donations from entities or companies which do not expect anything in return are accepted without any special requirements when the donation is less than 10'000Eur/year. Donations larger than 10'000Eur per year require the explicit consent of all Committee Members.

Art. 3: Structure of the Association

The Association consists of members. A subset of the members form the Committee. The Committee shall consist of four people. The Committee includes the President of the Association, and one or more Responsible(s) for financial accounting, bookkeeping, IT infrastructure.

Art. 4: General Meeting

  1. The General Meeting of Members is the supreme governing body of the association.
  2. The General Meeting is called by the Committee or, as required by law, if one-fifth of the Members request so.
  3. The location of the General Meeting is decided by the Committee. The time and location should coincide, if possible, with other major events such as conferences organized by the Association.
  4. General Meetings must be announced at least five days in advance. In case of dispute on time and location the Committee Members decide. Announcements are made over the internal email mailing list. New members are added by the Committee to the mailing list upon admission.

Art. 5: Powers

  1. During the General Meeting, the Members decide, compatibly with the other articles of the present Statute, on admission and exclusion of members, appoint the Committee Members, amend the Statute of the Association and decide all matters which are not reserved to other governing bodies (such as the responsible body for financial accounting) of the Association.
  2. For guaranteeing stability and continuity in pursuing the Association's mission, incoming and outcoming Committee Members as well as amendments to the Statute must be approved by three out of the four Committee Members. In case that there are less than four Committee Members these points must be approved by the President. All Committee Members must agree on the admission.
  3. The General Meeting supervises the activities of the governing bodies and may at any time dismiss the latter without prejudice to any contractual rights of those dismissed. The right of dismissal exists by law whenever justified by good cause.

Art. 6: Voting rights and majority

  1. All Members have equal voting rights at the General Meeting.
  2. Resolutions require a majority of the votes of the members physically present, however Committee Members have the right to vote remotely through encrypted video-conference or per email signed with the deposited GPG key within 24 hours from the receipt of the voting question.
  3. Resolutions may be taken on matters for which proper notice has not been given only where this is expressly permitted by the articles of the Association.

Art. 7: Representation of the Association

The Association is publicly represented by the Committee Members. The Committee Members are responsible of the content of public talks, of the f-si.org website, and of social platforms such as mastodon.f-si.org. The Committee Members must act according to the philosophy of the Association when acting in its name.

Art. 8: Membership

  1. Applications for becoming a member of the Association must be directed to the Committee Members per email at mail@f-si.org. The Committee Members can accept the new membership by unanimous vote. The Committee Members have the right of expelling by unanimous vote those Members who clearly do not adhere to the mission of the Foundation or who work towards its disruption. Only members who can actively contribute to the mission of the Foundation are accepted. Contributions may be either technical (knowledge, programming, etcetera) or political (campaigning, etcetera), but not financial. New members must provide their GPG public key, and the mailing list must be encrypted.
  2. All members have a legal right to resign subject to one day notice per GPG-signed email at mail@f-si.org .

Art. 9: Dissolution

  1. The association may be dissolved at any time by resolution of the Committee Members.

References

  1. https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19070042/index.html , retrieved 12.12.2018
  2. https://www.fsf.org/, retrieved 12.12.2018
  3. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, retrieved 12.12.2018
  4. http://solderpad.org/licenses/, retrieved 12.12.2018