The Sad Story of XOOPS: Governance Fail

by Joe Brockmeier - Apr. 28, 2010Comments (7)

XOOPS Logo

The XOOPS community was dealt a bad hand last week. The Dutch Court has rejected its suit against former project manager Herko Coomans and allowed Coomans to keep funds totally more than €15,000 held in a fund earmarked for the project.

This is hardly the first open source project to come into a bad way when early or original founders split due to disagreements. Gentoo had all manner of drama surrounding founder Daniel Robbins departure and attempted return. CentOS experienced issues with control of its funds and its domain last year. There's the split from Mambo to Joomla, X.org from XFree86... most of which have their roots in poor governance issues.

The XOOPS site has a full accounting from the perspective of the remaining XOOPS community, but the bottom line is that things went south because most of the control of the project's resources were held by one member of the project.

Simon Phipps hits the nail on the head, saying that open source communities need get their governance right up-front:

There’s an important lesson for all open source communities; get your governance right, with actual legal control distributed among the members. You may trust each other now, but that won’t help in a few years time when you no longer trust each other and something has gone wrong. The time to put a sound foundation in place is before you build the building, not after it’s built.

An environment of trust at the start of a community is exactly the right time to put a solid legal framework in place.

Even when the "good guys" prevail, these sorts of splits are enormously disruptive. Community members wind up focusing on the legal battles rather than development, which is never a good thing.

The biggest problem, aside from convincing communities that they need to get governance right very early, is the lack of resources to help with this. Some projects have gotten governance right, but there aren't a lot of templates to work from. The Open Source Way book has great suggestions from the community organization standpoint, but not much in the way of legal help.

We need more projects like the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and Software in the Public Interest (SPI) to work with fledgling projects. SFC and SPI usually only work with established projects, which is understandable but problematic since projects may be well into danger territory before they are large enough to qualify for acceptance.

But one thing is clear: If all of your projects resources are controlled by one or a few people in the community, it's a potential problem that needs to be solved quickly.

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by Bryen Yunashko on Apr. 28, 2010

With openSUSE, we've been looking at this and other cases and you're right when you say there aren't many templates to choose from. We can easily find the "wrong" way to do things, but not that many "right"" ways. And then finding the right one that fits in with how your community works is the next challenge.

Clearly, assets need to be first and foremost in your mind when creating a legal entity. Too often, people fall into the trap of only thinking about it as a way to draw in funding through tax-deductible donations. As important as that is, it shouldn't be the #1 priority. Creating a legal entity that gives the community as a whole legal status is what needs to be done here.

XOOPs case, as morally right as it would have been to give the assets back to the community, failed legally because it didn't give its community legal status. The community's voice wasn't heard in court because simply, the community's voice wasn't heard when creating the stitchting (the legal entity that XOOPS was created under.)

So the lesson we're all learning from this is an important one, which is, think of your community, remember your community, talk to your community before you sign those papers creating the legal entity.

1 Votes

by Steve McMahon on Apr. 29, 2010

"""If all of your projects resources are controlled by one or a few people in the community, it's a potential problem that needs to be solved quickly."""

I'd change "all" to "any." Particularly if that resource is a trademark or domain name. An open-source project with code, domains or trademarks that aren't 100% owned by a well-constructed foundation is a time bomb.

2 Votes

by Asigot Tech on Apr. 29, 2010

Any Open source project that does not belong to the community it is supported by as a whole fails, it is closed in by people and no longer truly open and open source.

People will always be people and people are individually unreliable.

Plone, amongst a few others gets this right.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Apr. 29, 2010

Any Open source project that does not belong to the community it is supported by as a whole fails, it is closed in by people and no longer truly open and open source.

People will always be people and people are individually unreliable.

Plone, amongst a few others gets this right.

0 Votes

by Joe Klemmer on May. 16, 2010

Asigot Tech: There are rare cases of projects succeeding with one "dictator" in control. OpenBSD comes to mind.

0 Votes

by Tim on May. 18, 2010

This article neglects to include some true facts here and as such misinforms all readers.

The fact that only a handful of the community (225 people) signed the petition for legal action out of some approximate 100,000 (100 thousand) members, so not even 1% of members agreed with legal action or the reasons why the "NEW" management of XOOPS felt it important to constantly bully and target an individual.

If the "NEW" organisation and management claiming ownership of XOOPS could have acted responsibly and organised themselves appropriately, then funds and rights could have been transferred from the legally formed foundation after it had been dissolved.

For a more accurate account with facts from the individual they persistently bullied causing much pain to him and his family: http://www.herkocoomans.net/2010/05/xoops-foundation-llc-loses-its-civil...

It is most likely safe to assume the XOOPS project has wasted over £5,000 or possibly even double and treble that on an invalid legal case, this is all money which belongs the community and has been donated by the community.

As some one who was also treated badly and abused by the "NEW" management I can't help but feel sad for them but for different reasons than this article tries to report.

0 Votes

by wishcraft on May. 28, 2010

I find Michael becks consistent taught of wishcraft immature. THe man known as mamba on XOOPS.org is a dictatorship next to Hitler and I know that phppp cares little for his input not that it is ever anything more than a loosely constructed sentence often without any educated opinion more a valid view of self dysfunctional motives.

0 Votes