[I am not an attorney. The below is my interpretation.]
Rocky has to have legal standing. It can’t just exist in a utopian environment where everyone has all the same legal rights. Rocky is for the community, but that doesn’t mean that all members of the community have equal legal rights to owning everything about it. In order to protect trademarks, branding, properties, etc., it has to have a legal entity behind it. That’s the RESF (Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation). The RESF exists to represent and defend the various associated Rocky properties (such as the name, the website, the logo, etc). When we say that Rocky will never be controlled by a single entity or organization, we don’t mean that Rocky won’t have legal standing. That’s absurd. What we mean is that we’re preventing another company from taking over Rocky and selling out and giving the owners the ability to do whatever they want with that. It means we’re committing to transparency, community involvement, and what the community deems is in the best interest of the project.
The assurances we give the community are in the community charter.
We don’t have investors, or shareholders. We have sponsors and partners, but they can’t dictate what we do. They can’t pay some amount of money to get a seat on the board and then use that influence to shift direction or do something that would be detrimental to the community interest.
Who is ‘we’? The advisory board is made up of the team leads for each team. Collectively, that is the leadership team for Rocky.
Why not 501c3? We haven’t completely ruled this out. A B corp can transition to this just the same as a C corp can. After engaging legal counsel, we’ve determined it’s not the best approach at this time. But people seem to think that a 501c3 is some kind of magic organizational structure that automatically guarantees that the entity will be transparent and ‘good’ or ethical. In reality, it’s the commitment the entity makes to the community and their structure that help give this assurance.