Rick Hohensee
March 22 1999


cLIeNUX is intended to provide a basis for a membership/redistribution
model of compensating authors of open-source software. This model is
intended to be somewhat similar to the ASCAP/BMI mechanism for paying
authors and performers of music. This the guideline I intend to persue
with cLIeNUX membership. Nothing here is in any way guaranteed. 


PARTIES TO cLIeNUX

There are several parties to such a system as I hope to apply it to
cLIeNUX. 

There is the "ownership" of cLIeNUX. That is currently me, Rick
Hohensee. Equity interest is available. 

There is the "membership" of cLIeNUX, parties whose membership fees
are current. Membership is $20-- per year. There are currently no paid 
members in cLIeNUX.  

A subset of the membership are the "contributers" of cLIeNUX. The e in
that spelling is intentional. Contributers are individuals qualified to
recieve re-distribution of cLIeNUX membership revenues. Qualifying for
compensation for contributing to the content of cLIeNUX requires several
things.
	I, Rick Hohensee, am not a "contributer" in this sense.
	A contributer has no equity in cLIeNUX.
	A contributer is a paid member of cLIeNUX.
	A contributer is the copyright holder of some cLIeNUX content.
		
Other parties, such as the Linux kernel development community, the GNU
Project, the Free Software Foundation, the Linux Documentation Project,
various organizations holding copyrights on open-source software, and the
users of cLIeNUX, only pertain to this mechanism as they may fit into the
above categories. 



COMPENSATABLE CONTENT

Members may submit notification of copyrighted cLIeNUX content to the
ownership. Ownership may also aknowledge authorship without notice from
a member being necessary. On a quarterly basis a summation of these
compensatable components will be made. An account will be derived from
this summation  of each contributer's percent of the entire
member-authored content of cLIeNUX. 

Binary files that are produced from text files by compilation or other
processes may be compensatable in accordance with copyright notices in the
text, which text may or may not be in the actual distributed cLIeNUX
content. Programs that are only distributed in binary form are not
compensatable by cLIeNUX. 

Analysis of what portions of large works are by what authors is to be
performed at the best ability of the ownership, but accuracy of authorship
accounting is not guaranteed in any way. The dichotomy between cLIeNUX
membership and ownership is absolute for this reason; so that the
ownership's motive will be to do what is best for cLIeNUX as a whole. The
ownership also is the sole authority on the content of cLIeNUX.


TOTAL COMPENSATION

Every quarter 20 percent of all cLIeNUX membership revenues for the
quarter will be redistributed to the contributers. Ownership may change
the overall percentage with one years notice to the membership, but the
overall percentage is not to be effected by variations in individual
contributer percentages. 




Here is an earlier draft of this system.....
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Begging is so pitiful, isn't it?
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<pre>
 cLIeNUX, probably most important of all, is an attempt to initialize a
compensation model that solves some of the problems of funding the
development of open source software and documentation. cLIeNUX will be
available for free, as is necessary by law for most of it's core contents. 
However, you can become a member of cLIeNUX for an annual membership fee
of $20-- US. Oh boy. All I can guarantee that will get you at this point
is that you will be supporting my style of distributing open source
software. I will also make public a list of members in chronological order
by date of membership.
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If this germinates, a plowback system will be instituted to return a
defined percentage of cLIeNUX revenue to contributors of
cLIeNUX-originated materials. It will probably go something like this....


        cLIeNUX revenues will be announced publicly. Costs might not be.

        20% of gross revenue will be returned to the membership. 

   	The redistribution of that 20% will be by proportion of all
	materials in cLIeNUX as a portion of total cLIeNUX-originated
	material on a plain storage-consumed basis.

	Example: for a cLIeNUX CD it is determined that there are 50
	megabytes of material that are original to cLIeNUX. Member # 
	762324, Sally Bright, has contributed 3 megabytes of examples for
	the cLIeNUX stock paint program. Sally is due 6% of the member
	plowback fund for the time her stuff is in the distro. Since there
	were an average of 2000 members for that time, Sally gets a check
	for $6000-- .

	A file will be considered the quantum of compensatableness except 
	in a few cases.
	Compensation for important files and packages, such as the kernel
	image, may be subject to advisement or recusal by the aknowledged
	maintainers thereof.

	2% of gross revenue will be donated to organizations related to
	Linux, open source, or other beneficial phenomena, such as sevices
	for the homeless, which have in a sense already made thier
	contributions to cLIeNUX.


I'll be going into more detail on this. Hopefully also various other
benefits of membership in cLIeNUX will evolve. Any such benefits will not
compromise the open-source nature of cLIeNUX. This is based on ideas I had
for a from-scratch new OS proposal, but a from-scratch new scenario would
be MUCH simpler, compensation-wise. Linus said last night in linux-kernel,
"It will be complicated. Fairness always is." and he was talking about
interrupt spinlocks or some such. Add money to the equation and complexity
explodes. 

The most vicious remark this proposal has recieved so far is calling it "a
pyramid scheme". cLIeNUX is no more a pyramid scheme than any other
original venture. As it stands now, it is just begging, except that I do
believe there is more value to cLIeNUX than "I need help". cLIeNUX has
been a lot of work already. I do believe cLIeNUX is well-differentiated
from other existing distributions, and that's not easy.

Please help bootstrap cLIeNUX as a venture. I very much hope that it
proves to be in your interest to do so. Email me or call if you have a
question about possible equity in the venture. 



Rick Hohensee                      phone    301-595-4063
3234 Powder Mill Rd.
Adelphi, Md. 20783
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Rick Hohensee                      phone    301-595-4063
3234 Powder Mill Rd.
Adelphi, Md. 20783
 <p>
humbubba@smart.net  rhohen@gwdg.de  and last and least, 
rickh@capaccess.org
