[Chris McDonough]
... The Apache Software Foundation has 9 members (http://www.apache.org/foundation/board/).
Their board of directors has 9 members, but the ASF has many more members than that: http://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html
I don't recognize all the names, but at least three are definitely coders, and companies are not mentioned at all. Their bylaws have no math in them for retaining board seats based on payment into the foundation, but maybe there is some informal agreement.
I doubt it, because the Python Software Foundation's (of which I'm a director) bylaws were modeled on the ASF's. For both, you can become a member only by being nominated by an existing member, and then voted in by a majority of existing members. Anyone (regardless of whether they're a member) can sit on the board, and the board is determined solely by membership vote. So any informal agreement would have to be embraced by a majority of the members to be effective, and that's just unlikely. For the PSF, a sure way to get on the Board is to say you're willing to do it <0.3 wink>; I imagine it's similar with the ASF. We should note that the ASF and PSF are both 501(c)(3) non-profits under US tax law, which puts imprecise but serious legal bounds on how much they _can_ be "controlled by", or benefit, a small group without getting into deep legal doo doo. In effect, we endure those restrictions so that US contributors can get a tax deduction, and to make legal actions against us especially unattractive (this one's complicated, but it's not a coincidence that you don't hear about many people suing the Red Cross <wink>). I don't know which part of the non-profit spectrum the Zope Foundation is aiming at, but I'd guess that the ZF wouldn't want to hassle with a charity's legal restrictions (yup, the PSF is a "public charity" in US legal jargon, same as the Red Cross).