Hi Steven,
first of all, thank you for all the time you spent on the Foundation thing.
See the other thread. I don't think paying developers as full time workers is a good idea. I think Contracts or bounties on certain projects are.
I agree.
I was wrong in the other email. I forgot we have $25 in the general fund atm which was raised at LinuxWorld. I expect we can make quite a bit selling CDs, T-Shirts, Etc, if we want as well as just accepting donations. As for the fear of lawsuit, the idea behind the foundation was that it was better the foundation get sued and try to have some cash for legal defence rather than some poor developer in school. Everybody here knows the risk from Microsoft....
This is and has always been a big issue (or big fear?): how is this handled on the Wine side? The only rational reason for a lawsuit is Microsft suspects ROS has some stolen code in it that belongs to them (see SCO versus Linux). We must therefore be sure our code is clean. There could be some funds for paying a code analysis performed by a third party (of course we can not ask a MS coder nor a ROS coder to look at their code and at ours and say if they differ).
Regards, Emanuele