Manjaro Linux treasurer resigns amid unjustified use of donation funds
forum.manjaro.org
forum.manjaro.org
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...
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?
There was no actual mishandling of funds, just [disagreement on procedure](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for-manjaro-...):
> 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.
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.
Holding off on the purchase after that event is the least they could've done.