IM Freedom Board Meeting 2026-08-08 00:08 UTC using Google Meet. All times are in UTC and currency is in USD.

Preamble and call to order at 00:08 UTC.

Directors present

• John Bailey, President/Treasurer
• Matthew Needham, Vice President
• Gary Kramlich, Secretary
• Patrick Cloke, Director
• Richard Laager, Director
• Peter Lawler, Director

Board Member Election

• Richard moves to re-elect the existing directors.
• Pete seconds
• Passes unanimously

Officer Election

• Richard moves to retain the current slate of officers.
• Pete seconds
• Passes unanimously

Treasurers Report

2025

Opening balance (2025-01-01)

Total: $20,202.49

• Checking account: $1,262.66
• PayPal: $137.31
• Fidelity Investment account: $18802.52

Expenses

Total Expenses: $2,648.90

• Domain Renewals: $198.30
• Legal Fees (trademark inquiry): $2450.00
  • $2,000 transferred from Investment Account to cover this expense.

Income

Total Income: $1,197.58

• Investment Dividends: $718.10
• Donations through Paypal: $155.60
• Paypal Giving Fund: $323.88

Closing Balance (2025-12-31)

Total: $18,751.77
Net Loss: ($1451.32)

• Checking Account: $1,082.26
• Paypal: $148.89
• Fidelity Investment Account: $17,520.62

2026

Opening Balance (2026-01-01)

Total: $18,751.77

• Checking Account: $1,082.26
• Paypal: $148.89
• Fidelity Investment Account: $17,520.62

Expenses

Total: $139.76

• Domain Renewals: $139.76

Income

Total: $709.22
Net Income: $569.46

• Donations via PayPal: $30.38
• Paypal Giving Fund: $314.39
• Investment Dividends: $338.45
• Spreadshirt: $26.00

Current Balances:

Total: $19,321.23

• Checking Account: $1,108.26
• Fidelity Investment Account: $17,859.07
• Paypal: $353.90

Old Business

Registered Agent

We would like to change to something cheaper than CT Corp/Wolters Kluwer as it’s now just about $200 per year to keep using the current agent.

No movement has happened with this yet. We can only switch agents when we’re in the last four months of the registration and we missed that window.

Gary has created an appointment for March 15th 2027 to kick this off which is the first day we can do this. IMFB-13 was also created to keep track of this.

Verify Mark Doliner is no longer on the PayPal Account

Matthew was going to verify that Mark Doliner was successfully removed from the PayPal account.

This has been completed and Mark is no longer associated with the account.

Become a CNA

Some work on security.imfreedom.org which is meant to become the basis for everything of applying to be a CNA. Open and public issues are visible here.

Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt was complaining about our name not matching, Matthew was going to look at this.

Matthew and Gary looked at this and apparently got it fixed as we received a payment from them.

Matthew was going to look at opening an EU spreadshirt shop. There was some discussion about this somewhere but I can’t seem to find it right now.

This has been completed but because of GDPR designs couldn’t be automatically transferred over. Gary has said he will take care of this and has created IMFB-14 for it.

Registering Adium and Pidgin Trademarks

We were going to reach out to Pamela Chestek about registering Adium and possibly Pidgin trademarks, but none of this happened yet.

After some discussion we have determined that this might not be as necessary as we thought, but Matthew is going to think about it some more and bring it up on the email list if we want to proceed.

New Business

Board Meeting Media

Gary has decided to just do minutes and audio for the board meeting. The video was not really necessary and is one less thing that needs to be done.

Everyone agrees this is fine and notes that we’re only required to do the minutes.

State of the Bird

Gary is retiring the State of the Bird posts for now. He is currently 3 months behind now, no one has asked for one, and the quarterly releases seem to be filling the gap.

Everyone agrees this is fine.

Clone Retro Servers

Gary has reached out to the operators of logon.chat and ChivaNet which are community ran instances of Open Oscar Server to see if there is anything he or IMfreedom could do to help them. These are, to his knowledge, very light weight machines so hosting costs should not be much or something like that.

Gary mentions he’s been paying for our server hosting out of pocket for the last few years. He’s not asking for support, but figured everyone should be made aware.

Richard mentions that we want to be careful with supporting these other projects when it comes to being responsible for abuse. Essentially that we should not be taking on that responsibility.

Gary mentions that our pidginchat.com XMPP instance faces similar issues but he is looking to shut it down in the near future as it hasn’t met the initial goals and isn’t getting the maintenance/administration attention that it should be.

Richard asks what kind of resources we would need to move off of Digital Ocean as he may have some machines that we could use. Gary described some of the issues and what he’s been doing with everything.

Richard and Gary decide to take this discussion offline.

Fastly

Previously Gary has looked at using Fastly to become a CDN for our file hosting which would let us move away from SourceForge.

Fastly has an Open Source sponsorship which Gary started looking into a while back but didn’t get too far as it required learning Varnish Config language (VCL) which he avoided as there wasn’t a pressing need.

Gary met a Fastly employee in the Open Oscar Server Discord and was able to get some technical questions answered and this should be very easy to do with Fastly and they even offered to help us with the VCL scripts.

AI/LLM

Patrick asks if we have or should have an AI/LLM policy.

Gary mentions that his stance for the projects he’s maintaining is that we do not want to accept AI/LLM contributions and would prefer to not have to write a policy about it, but realizes that this is becoming inevitable.

Gary tells an anecdote from the past how Gaim/Pidgin rejected a bunch of patches that were the result of de-compiling the Yahoo! Messenger binary on the grounds that it could be considered intellectual property theft and we wanted to protect the project from legal action.

Using this as precedent, it’s very difficult to justify accepting AI/LLM generated code because it falls in a very similar legal gray area which could put the project at risk.

Richard says that it makes more sense to him for IM Freedom to not define a policy as Adium and Pidgin could have different stances on it.

Gary mentions that he’s not trying to become the “AI Police”. He does not want to spend his time trying to decide if a contribution is the result of AI or not. So if AI was used to reformat the code or something, he doesn’t care. What it ultimately comes down to is, “if the code is good, then it’s good” and in his experience, AI code is not good and easily detectable. But if someone is openly admitting to using AI for the majority of their contribution, he doesn’t want to spend his time reviewing work the contributor didn’t do themselves.

Richard mentions this could create a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy and lead to people hiding the use of AI. Gary agrees but laments “What else do you do except become an AI detective”.

Peter brings the discussion back to whether or not IM Freedom should be deciding on whether a project can use AI or not and that he thinks IM Freedom should allow the projects to do what they decide is fit for their projects.

Gary agrees, but mentions that we have a single contributor guide to cover all the projects and that if he were to write an AI policy it was going to go into that guide and that we could create a separate document which the projects could reference.

Richard mentions that Software in the Public Interest wouldn’t set an AI policy for Debian and that’s something that we mimic as we’re an advisory group. Gary points out that our website states

It is important to note that we exist to assist the communities in developing their software; we do not control development.

Gary summarizes this by saying, that that statement seems to specify that IM Freedom will not get involved and it’s up to the project.

Patrick agrees and thought it was worth the conversation. Everyone else agrees.

Subdomains for Projects

Gary then asks if creating pages at project.imfreedom.org would be graying those lines too much. He was planning on doing this to avoid getting additional domains.

John states that he thinks they should be project.pidgin.im as they’re more related to Pidgin.

Gary disagrees with this, stating that Ibis, Motmot, birb, etc don’t depend on libpurple.

Richard asks if there are other consumers of these libraries. Gary states that they are not yet that he is aware of. Richard goes on to state that if he had to decide he’d put them under pidgin.im.

Gary then asks where the Gaim stuff goes. No one responds. Gary then goes on to say that it’d make more sense under a libpurple domain if one existed.

Richard agrees, and then says that he doesn’t have a problem with putting them under imfreedom.org when they’re not big enough for their own domains.

Gary brings up finch.im which was created with the hope of having a community develop around it. However, Gary never got that kicked off and is instead letting the domain expire because why bother paying for it when we can put it at finch.imfreedom.org for no additional cost.

John mentions that Finch is mostly a dead project at this point as it needs too much maintenance.

Gary mentions that a lot of that maintenance has already been completed, but that there is a lot of quality of life work that needs to be done yet. However, Finch had been deleted from the repository as the effort to update it in place would most likely be more than just rebuilding from scratch.

Adjournment

• Peter motions to adjourn
• Gary seconds
• Passes unanimously

Meeting adjourned at 00:58 UTC.