[German only] Gründungsmitglieder für FAForever e.V. gesucht

[Bennis-]

Also wenns jetzt nur um 12 Euro geht und eine Unterschrift dann würde mich auch dazu bereiterklären. Und wenn jemand ein faf-Grillen organisiert, dann wäre ich auch dabei

[Brutus5000]

So first a disclaimer: I am open for discussion and I apologize if my answers sound snippy, but it is very late and I don't get much sleep recently due to my son.

You are talking about less than $1000 in fees. What is important and needs to be discussed openly is that you are talking about transferring ownership of FAF and its intellectual property from an American to a German entity.

This would change the way laws affect FAF. It is not as though FAF can presently ignore German law, or that after this transfer FAF can ignore American law, but laws will affect it differently.

Also, if it's an incorporated non-profit, who's going to do the books? Who's going to ensure things like GDPR compliance and the like? The legal quagmire you want to enter makes the litigous atmosphere in the US look like Woodstock. Imo its the least of your concerns, and if you'll pardon the pun, you're paying taxes on grief that doesnt exist.

America has the First Amendment. We have protections against "libel tourism." If I say something that pisses of a Saudi sheikh, he can go to a sharia court in Saudi Arabia (or a court in Khazakstan, or in the UK) and bring a case against me for defamation. And under those countries' laws, he might win. But he can't collect the judgment against me, because all of my assets are in America, and we don't honor libel judgments based on laws that are contrary to the First Amendment. If he sued me in America for it, he would lose, because First Amendment. Does Germany have anything like that?

Defamation liability should be a real concern because people use FAF to communicate things about other players all the time.

Similarly, Germany and the EU are moving in a direction of draconian limitations on speech. Every year, the speech that is allowed is narrower and narrower.

This is my personal opinion, but for me the U.S.A. is a failed state when it comes to law. What is worth freedom of speech, when there is a president openly telling everybody that he is willing to break the law and encourages his fellows to do the same because he can pardon them anytime he wants to. There is a system that tries to bring as many people into prison for simple crimes just to make profit out of them. I could bring much more arguments, but this is actually totally off-topic.

What for FAF is more important: The U.S.A. is the #1 country in the world where you pay absurd high (millions or billions of dollars) of penalties for breaking laws like copyright. This is not the case in Germany. In Germany the complainant has to prove the damage caused and the compensations for these cases are pretty low even in cases of fatal accidents.
If Square Enix ever decides to sue FAF in the U.S. I would expect FAF to go out of business immediately, while I have hopes that in Germany you can actually argue that no harm is done.

Germany has a bunch of political leaders with the technology understanding of squirtle just like in any other country. And yes, we need to make a reality check on law now and then and see if there are issues rising. But did anybody do that for the US right now? No. We just live with it and nobody ever spends a second thought about it.

Why not form a non-profit organization in the USA? Or in Russia?

Why germany?
1. Because the German law offers a way to form a legal entity that is in the democratic hands of multiple people.
2. Because there is nobody who ever volunteered to do this and ever checked the implications to do this. I can make this happen in Germany and a lot of contributors I work with also live in Germany or at least in Europe who supports me in this. I cannot do this in the USA or Russia as I'm not a citizen there and I don't know the law.
3. Because there is a huge playerbase and many many of my fellow contributors speak german or live in neighboured countries.

Or, why not just leave things as they are? What are the risks inherent in just doing nothing?

There are quite a few things a lot of core contributors are unhappy with and why this almost lead to a fork of the project end of 2018:
1. We are bound to the decisions of Visionik even if we personally disagree (this is why we have Steam link enforced now)
2. The work of the current LLC is not transparent. We don't see how much money is going in and out. We have no claim to ask for this.
3. There is no community control about the expenses. Did you ever wonder where all the Patreon money goes? Would you like to know how much we have in the account? I would like to know and even as a councilor I'm not capable of getting answers from sheeo and my approaches to make FAF more transparent lead me nowhere.
4. There is no democratic decision making process. Many contributors are unhappy with the current administrative situation, yet we are incapable of voting for a different administration as it is cemented by the weird current legal structure.
5. Some things in FAF are really werid like the server being rented by sheeo his own company instead of the LLC which prevents me as the main server admin to gain access to support functions of our hoster and shenanigans like that.

So let's say it this way: Will run FAF go on if we don't do anything? Probably yes. But this is a FAF I'm no longer willing to support in my free time.

We shouldn't do something unless it is better than doing nothing. And why would we have this discussion only in the German language? A lot of non-German players speak English and would be able to participate a lot more in an English-language discussion.

This thread is about finding people willing to found an association which is the first baby step in a longer process. And it reduces a lot of hassle for me if I can do it with people speaking German and living nearby.

Which decisions are made by the board members and which decisions are made by the members of the association? Does that include things like selecting the Player Councilor, balance team, forum moderators, etc.?

Who is allowed to be a member of the association?

Once it is founded: Everybody, world wide.
I will not ask the 4 people to leave after founding. Everybody is welcome. I just need 5 volunteers right now to go the first step and people might leave after founding (e.g. because they don't want to contribute in the long term but just help me right now).

Can the association vote to remove board members?

Yes, by law. There is an annual mandatory plenary meeting where people can vote for the board members. There is also the opportunity to call for an extraordinary meeting by the associations members to replace the people in the board.

Can the board decide to remove people from the association?

Yes. Geosearchef already complained about that, but usually you want to maintain the right to remove people who share racist ideologies or crap like that. Again this is something covered by law where it says "for important reason". You can go to court against such decisions.

Who is going to have the political power over FAF?

All association members vote for the leadership on an annual basis.

This association would have the power to do things like charge fees to access FAF? I understand that you are saying there is no plan right now to charge money to play FAF. But I'm asking whether this association would have the power to add that requirement in the future.

The association constitution states that we want to offer services free of charge. The constitution can only be changed if a qualified majority of association members agrees in a plenary meeting.

Would this change in ownership in any way stop people from creating a fork of FAF? For example, if I forked the FAF project, would I be able to use all of the maps that are in the map vault? Or were they only uploaded with permission to be used by FAF itself and not forks of FAF? Is this new German company going to give itself the right to sue a fork to prevent the fork from using maps uploaded to FAF? Are balance changes released under an open source license, or are the balance changes property of FAF? And would the association have the power to change which things are open source vs. proprietary to FAF (meaning that a fork could not use them)?

This is a very complex topic and my statement on this is: The current situation will not be changed by this (neither positively nor negatively). The maps&mods uploads are completely unregulated and therefore not free licensed. Same applies on game or balance patches as the repository contains big chunks of code copyrighted by Square Enix. Still remains a grey area.

Would membership in this association open someone up to liability? Can members of an organization be sued if the organization breaks the law? Could we be fined by the German government if they don't like decisions we make?

Regular members are safe. Board members are liable for intentionaly breaking the law. In general, it offers the same "safety" as the LLC does.

Could the organization "gift" memberships to people without making them pay fees (or reimburse membership fees)? That could open things up to manipulation if free memberships were used to stack the votes.

Not directly. There is a legal possibility to give fringe benefits to people, this is capped by law however and every member could sue the board if there is shenanigans going on. (In bigger associations you usually have a treasurer and 2 people who control him annually - all voted in the plenary meeting, but I'm afraid we do not have enough volunteers.
I'd like to make finances fully transparent so association members could see every movement of money on the bank account once per quarter in a report or something.

Is all official business of this organization going to be conducted in the German language? Is voting going to happen online, or in person in germany? How often do we vote on things? For the same reason that having this discussion in German-only shuts out many people, that would limit the ability of Americans, Russians, and others to participate in the organization.

Official business in terms of talking with federal agencies and lawyers: yes.
All association meetings are supposed to be online and in english.
Publications should be in english and further translations (volunteers required).

If there are 50 paying members, and they're getting ready to vote on things, and the day before the vote, 100 Russians sign up and become members, does FAF suddenly and irrevocably fall under Russian control forever? Could they just vote to replace the board members and change the bylaws and suddenly Russia will forever have control? Or 100 Chinese, or 100 people from Reddit, or whomever.

Yes, that is indeed a theoretical risk. If I'd notice that as a board member I would start asking people to verify their identity via passports. This is one of the reasons why I'd like to have an annual membership fee and I'd restrict votes to people who paid the fee (not sure if this is possible by law). Another possibility is (something I encountered myself in an association already): A 1 year memberhsip on probation and the other association members can ask for denial of membership during that time.
But however I do it, there will be people who either complain we are playing gatekeepers to hold out people with a different opinion or I'm opening FAF for enemy takeover. There is no real solution. But I'm also not sure if there is a real problem.

In my opinion, the most important thing is to prevent anyone from taking over FAF by making sure that as much of the IP as possible is available under open source licenses for use by a fork. (For example, people should not be able to upload maps to the map vault unless they agree that not only can the map be used by FAF, but that it can be used by similar projects like a fork of FAF, or LOUD AI.) That will keep FAF honest. If this German association is taken over by bad people, what happens then? If you form this german association and I join it, i can ask the other members to vote on things like proposals to ensure that FAF's IP is all open-source and forkable?

As a person who already pursued a fork I can tell you we partially lost that battle already when FAF starting taking intellectual property without asking for their consent to share it. I also talked to some mod contributors and they intentionally have no interest in free-licensing their contributions, because they don't want their work to be mixed with others or badly patch or other evil stuff.
We can work on improving the situation on forkability, but this is not really related to founding of the association. The source code on github is mostly licensed and there where it is free it will always be free and the association could never change it as it does not own the copyright (the author of each commit owns it).

I'm not trying to be fear-mongering. I am raising these concerns because I would like answers to my questions. Not because I assume the worst about all of this. It might even be an opportunity for the community to assert itself in terms of guaranteeing that FAF is free (in every sense of the word) so I'm not 100% opposed to this, I'm just very cautious.

So I hope I answered most of your question. But I'd like to add some things:

1. I can't force anybody to trust me. I can only tell you that the hours I invested into the FAF project (not playing) has probably has 4 digits by now. And I can also tell you that I have talked a lot of this stuff through with many other contributors and also with Visionik. If Visionik trusts me, why would you not?
2. There are a lot of open source projects out there which share similar risks and history shows that it works. Examples: Debian (US non profit) or KDE (german association for support)
3. This is about community involvment. I would like to found this association even if it does not take over FAF because FAF in the current structure is obviously incapable of doing cool community stuff like barbecues, developer conferences etc.
4. Maybe this is offensive, but I'm wondering why people suddenly care? There is a bunch of people who are unhappy with the current situation for a long time and yet here is first person offering a solution and suddenly everything is questionable where it wasn't before.

[Brutus5000]

If my Deutsch is any good, who is required to pay a fee - everyone or just the "board members"? It isnt really clear.

Every member of the association.

If you don't register as a non-profit, Square Enix will have something to say about it. They might have something to say about it regardless.

German associations must have a non-profit constitution otherwise they will not be approved. As state above, there is second meaning of non-profit in sense of german tax which gains tax advantages but esports associations fight for the acceptance as charitable entities for years now with no success.

If it's everyone, how do you propose to collect fees? If it's something like PayPal, and the number of fake/fraudulent accounts are such a big problem, then chargeback costs on cancelled troll payments are going to bankrupt this setup faster than you can say "mex".

Never thought about this. In Europe or let's say european payment are (SEPA) you can always use direct transferral. Which is totally risk free. Will need to check.

I dont mind paying for this service - it will hopefully reduce the asshole factor. That being said, transparency is a concern and a lot of kids simply won't be able to make a monthly transaction, even if it is only one euro.

It would be a payment once a year for the whole year.

Also, if it's an incorporated non-profit, who's going to do the books? Who's going to ensure things like GDPR compliance and the like? The legal quagmire you want to enter makes the litigous atmosphere in the US look like Woodstock. Imo its the least of your concerns, and if you'll pardon the pun, you're paying taxes on grief that doesnt exist.

The board is responsible.
Regarding the tax advantage: Charitable entities don't have to pay sales tax, so you would get e.g. the server 19% cheaper in germany just like a regular company. But again, this doesn't work out for esports topics.

Lastly, and I hate to say this, but if history has taught us anything at all, once there is even a whiff of profit motive for the power mongers then all bets are off.

If the board is trying to gain personal money it is violating the constitution and you can sue it and/or replace it by extraordinary plenum.

[Morax]

I have been offering to give some money as a sign of appreciation, as I love the game, for years, and you respectfully declined.

Now you want to charge fees to run it? Sounds to me like you want to take over and didn't care about the money. Anyone who denies cash and says "it is not necessary," then some years later does this comes off as a little awful to me. I kind of would like an explanation.

[Geosearchef]

I have been offering to give some money as a sign of appreciation, as I love the game, for years, and you respectfully declined.

Now you want to charge fees to run it? Sounds to me like you want to take over and didn't care about the money. Anyone who denies cash and says "it is not necessary," then some years later does this comes off as a little awful to me. I kind of would like an explanation.

Please read the thread above before posting.

NOBODY WILL BE CHARGED FOR USING FAF. In the current system this would theoretically still be possible, the association actually aims to prevent this from happening as keeping it free will be part of the founding constitution.
FAF is and will remain completely open source, everybody can fork if they want.

NOTHING will change abiut FAF's system except for adding an emergency mechanism to democratically remove the leadership as well as a legal buffer.

About the legal aspect, FAF is already mainly regulated by european (german) laws as the server is located in germany rented by a european person/company.
The only thing the LLC technically owns, is the name FAForwver, the domain faforever.com and the user registration data. It does not own the software, it does not own the replays and it certainly doesn't own maps and mods.

This idea is also already a few years old and has been discussed with sheeo and visionik a year ago after the attemoted fork of SupComHub. As far as I am aware they were both fine with this solution.

[Morax]

I have read the whole thread, and quite honestly I find it gravely concerning a group of people came up with these details without discussing it through and out in you know where.

Care to explain why this wasn't raised as some kind of a meeting beforehand?

[Geosearchef]

Care to explain why this wasn't raised as some kind of a meeting beforehand?

That's something I want to know as well.

As far as I get it this thread is not for debating this idea. That will come at a far later stage. It's for figuring out if enough people would even help founding, cause last time we were only 4-5
That's also the reason why it's in german.

If you're asking why there was no council involvement, that'd due to the fact that this concept is a direct result and was attempted last time after the supcomhub fork, which was supported by a large part of contributors not being content with the current FAF structure, especially the council and one person being legally responsible. Transferring FAF to a german non profit association turned out to be a solution to not splitting the community and was talked about in depth between SH people and sheeo and visionik.

[Morax]

Okay, I don't want to come off as "I don't like you or anything you are doing, Brutus," so here is a refresher from 2015:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9613&p=96801&hilit=donations#p96801

As early as 5+ years ago, I and several others raised this point about funding (also hopefully it's understood the retirement thing is sarcasm) and never got an answer. Still, to this day, I stand strong and refuse to donate to FAF's patreon and prefer to donate directly to events like tournaments and ladder leagues. I know where the money is going and that it goes to good use for the general player base.

The problem you really need to tackle is to spread awareness to those that donate, and shift them away, put their money in some place for a specific reason. It is the fault of the people who donate rather Sheeo, Visionik, et al for not educating themselves nor looking into this. For all they might know, it it could be that they think the server and maintenance cost justifies it.

It really does bother me how the amount of $ coming in does not get some fine, well understood breakdown. Sheeo and visionik, you got to do better with this.

I will follow up with Brutus points and explain why I do not like this plan later. First and foremost being I am very curious if he has an issue with the council in its entirety, or just a single person (Sheeo?).

This whole thing is like Sheeo's "Open Letter to ZePilot," so it's going to get a lot of heavy thought put into it. Stay tuned....

[Uveso]

Da nun klar ist das kein Spieler jemals etwas für den FAF Service bezahlen muß, bin ich dabei.

Since it is now clear that no player ever has to pay anything for the FAF service, i am in.

[MrTBSC]

to this day, I stand strong and refuse to donate to FAF's patreon and prefer to donate directly to events like tournaments and ladder leagues. I know where the money is going and that it goes to good use for the general player base.
...

not realy, you are donating torwards very specific things that primarily goes torwards the competitive scene ... if you donate torwards tournaments the general playerbase has nothing from it but only the organizers of the tournament and the participants ...

to donate money torwards good use for the general playerbase would involve such things as paying for the servercosts or developentwork that improves the game in one way or another .. be that content, patches or new mechanical features and quality of life functions ...

not to be "that guy" but what exacly do i care about some guy getting to win donated money?
the making of these events and tournaments are only temporal and for very few people ... there are only few to make videos of tournamentmatches to help the getting more exposition ...

imho FAF has been rather stagnant for a long time ... it needs improvements ...
of course it's totaly up to you what to do with your donations

i personaly do not donate money because i feel FAF's coremembers do not do a good work to keep the game fresh ...
nor have i any interest to become a foundingmember of a german based organisation ..