Background: After the creation of the Plone Foundation earlier this year, a non-profit foundation whose goals are to Protect and Promote Plone, a proposal was put up for vote among the Foundation Members.

Briefly explained, conservancy deals with who should hold the copyright to the Plone code. Currently, all the code is owned by Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan, two of Plone's founders - and with the creation of the Foundation, they wanted to transfer the ownership to the community.

A proposal to assign the copyright to the Plone Foundation was created, and the board offered their recommendations on the issue after consulting with the Free Software Foundation and Eben Moglen.

The proposal was then made available for voting among the Foundation Members. More background information can be found in the Plone Foundation Proposal Area

The process: The foundation opened for 2 weeks of discussion on the Foundation Member list, so questions could be answered, and people could make their viewpoints known. After this discussion period, votes were collected electronically.

The results: In the table below, you can see the results of the voting:

The outcome: Based on input from its membership, which recommended conservancy with a 79 to 1 vote, the Plone Foundation Board will make the necessary steps for the transfer of Plone's IP and copyright to the Foundation.

Thanks: We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, Ron Chichester, our executive director (and vote counter ;) Paul Everitt — and all the Plone Foundation members.

On behalf of the board,

Alexander Limi
Vice-President, Plone Foundation