
Manjaro Linux treasurer resigns amid unjustified use of donation funds - lebaux
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for-manjaro-community-funds/154888/13
======
lebaux
Link to Manjaro forums was also posted to Reddit, where jonathon (former
treasurer) explained futher:

Just over a year ago, Phil and Bernhard incorporated Manjaro GmbH Co&KR with
the intention of allowing them to be paid to work on Manjaro full-time and
make commercial deals. They also registered trademarks.

This put them at odds with the existing donation funds and community project
which knew nothing about the company. The company also meant them exerting
ownership over the brand, IP, etc.

To avoid the issue of community funds being used to fund the company, fiscal
hosting was set up with CommunityBridge and OpenCollective, with those being
administered by people who were independent of the company. Phil personally
still holds a large amount of community donations (more than in all of CB and
OC).

Expense claims against community funds have always been rare, and mainly
consisted of conference and travel expenses (notably where Manjaro was heavily
promoted as a brand).

There is a definite conflict when Manjaro GmbH is, for example, making deals
with a hardware company to optimise Manjaro for laptops, then claiming
expenses from community funds for laptops from that company to do development
for that company.

This was one factor which led to the above events.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/hwo33h/change...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/hwo33h/change_of_treasurer_for_manjaro_community_funds/)

~~~
greatgib
Thanks for the summary.

If the company was created recently, how can they have brand or IP ownership
over Manjaro that was pre-existing?

For example, for the Manjaro brand, to me it looks like that a trademark
should not worth much as the brand was already existing and in use for this
specific purpose for a long time before.

Maybe the community should just accumulate the proof of the existence of
Manjaro before 2019 just in case that the company wants to limit rights on
Manjaro?

------
Tanath
> unjustified use of donation funds

There was no actual mishandling of funds, just [disagreement on
procedure]([https://forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for-
manjaro-...](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for-manjaro-
community-funds/154888/100)):

> To clarify, there has not been any fund misuse. There has been a
> disagreement about the __process __of how the funds are allocated, but no
> funds have been allocated during the conflict.

~~~
lebaux
Well there is a lot of she said he said in that threat, sadly it was locked.

Even the very act of locking the topic speak volumes about linux distribution.

On top of that, prior to lock one of the mods called the users children.

I lost of respect for Manjaro today. Can't wait for PR statement.

~~~
jwatt
New thread, post-team announcement: [https://forum.manjaro.org/t/discussion-
about-the-change-in-m...](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/discussion-about-the-
change-in-manjaro-team-composition/155229)

