Software Freedom Conservancy
Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while Conservancy takes care of the projects' needs that do not relate directly to software development and documentation.
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Recent News
Backdrop CMS is the Conservancy's Newest Member Project
May 8, 2018
Software Freedom Conservancy is excited to announce that Backdrop CMS has joined as its newest member project. Backdrop CMS is a lightweight content management system for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits.
Deb Nicholson joins Conservancy as Director of Community Operations
May 1, 2018
Today Software Freedom Conservancy announces its newest employee, Deb Nicholson. Nicholson is a prominent software freedom advocate and organizer. Nicholson’s professional roots are in the world of local community organizing in Massachusetts. Her first roles in the free software movement were as a staff member at the Free Software Foundation. Nicholson won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her volunteer work with GNU MediaGoblin, a federated media-hosting service and OpenHatch, an initiative to help bring newcomers into free software. She is also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community in the Pacific Northwest. Most recently, she served as the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, a company that builds a defensive patent pool for open source software. Nicholson has volunteered for Conservancy for many years, including on Conservancy’s Evaluations Committee since 2015.
The First Annual International Copyleft Conference
Save the date: Monday 4 February 2019 in Brussels, Belgium
April 30, 2018
Software Freedom Conservancy — the home to many key copyleft projects like Inkscape, Samba and Wine, and known for its work enforcing the GPL for its own projects as well as Linux — announced today that Conservancy will coordinate the first conference focused entirely on copyleft licensing, strategy, enforcement, governance and best practices.
Conservancy Welcomes the Common Workflow Language as a Member Project
April 11, 2018
Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Common Workflow Language (CWL) as Conservancy’s newest member project. The CWL team develops and maintains a specification for describing data analysis workflows and tools in a way that makes them portable and scalable across a variety of software and hardware environments, as well as a supporting reference implementation.
The Common Workflow Language project follows the OpenStand principles for collaborative open standards development to openly evolve the CWL specifications, which have already been implemented by a large number of independent vendors and open source projects. CWL has seen a large uptake by researchers, in particular in the bioinformatics community, with more than 700 public CWL workflows developed across academia and industry.
Karen Sandler Wins the Prestigious Free Software Award
March 26, 2018
Photo by Kori Feener, CC BY‑SA 4.0
This past Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, Conservancy's Executive Director, Karen Sandler won the most prestigious Award in the area of software freedom: the Free Software Foundation's annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The award is given annually by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to an individual who has made “a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.”
Conservancy Blog
Congratulations to Tesla on Their First Public Step Toward GPL Compliance
by on May 18, 2018
Conservancy rarely talks publicly about specifics in its ongoing GNU General Public License (GPL) enforcement and compliance activity, in accordance with our Principles of Community Oriented GPL Enforcement. We usually keep our compliance matters confidential — not for our own sake — but for the sake of violators who request discretion to fix their mistakes without fear of public reprisal. As occurred a few years ago with Samsung, we're thrilled when a GPL violator decides to talk about their violation and works to correct it publicly. This gives us the opportunity to shine light on the real-world work of GPL and copyleft compliance. We're thus glad that, this week, Tesla has acted publicly regarding its current GPL violations and has announced that they've taken their first steps toward compliance.
Update on Trademark Action (Fraud Claim Dismissed, New Filing)
by on April 30, 2018
On Thursday, the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board (TTAB) dismissed SFLC's claim of fraud against Conservancy, as we predicted. On Friday, we moved to the next procedural step, which is to ask the TTAB to allow us to update our answer as planned.
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