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
Conservancy Files “Long Comments” for Its Three DMCA Exemptions
Conservancy Fights for User Rights and Control
December 15, 2020
Software Freedom Conservancy filed its long-form comments yesterday in support of three DMCA exemption requests in the Library of Congress' Copyright Office Triennial Rulemaking process. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides this process to grant temporary exemptions to allow circumvention of technological protection measures (i.e., DRM) that restrict access to copyrighted material.
Sage Sharp joins Conservancy as Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion focusing on Outreachy
December 2, 2020
Portrait © Sage Sharp, CC BY
Today Software Freedom Conservancy announces its newest employee, Sage Sharp. Sharp has been critical to the success of Outreachy, Conservancy’s diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people who are subject to systemic bias or impacted by underrepresentation in tech. Sharp joins as Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion, focusing on Outreachy.
Conservancy Blog
The Online Conference Has Been Liberated
by on February 8, 2021
Organizers' Panel from Legal & Policy DevRoom 2021
This weekend, the largest international FOSS conference in the world, FOSDEM, attempted, and succeeded, to achieve what we all thought was not yet possible: They ran a massive online conference event with 100% FOSS. There is no longer a viable argument to run any Open Source event or meetup using proprietary software.
On Elastic, its fork, MongoDB, and the SS Public License
by on January 29, 2021
Folks have been asking us if Conservancy's view on the SS Public License has changed in light of Elastic's recent license change. It hasn't. We have only a brief statement to add to our existing comments on this.
Thanks to all of our donors, Conservancy met our match challenge!
by on January 15, 2021
We're pleased to report that with your help we did it! This year's match challenge of $111,029 was the first posed entirely by individuals (and not companies) who care deeply about software freedom. The bulk of this match challenge was provided by one very generous donor who prefers to remain anonymous. Their amount was augmented by six Conservancy Supporters who came together to increase the match even more. Conservancy thanks (in alphabetical order) Jeremy Allison, Kevin P. Fleming, Roan Kattouw, Jim McDonough, Allison Randal and Daniel Vetter.
We also thank every person who donated this season. Whether it was $42, $120, $128, $512 or any other amount, your donation helps us continue our work to fight for software freedom! We can only do this work because you support us. We cannot wait to see what we can get done together in 2021!
Interview with Matcher and Conservancy Board member Jeremy Allison
by on January 14, 2021
Jeremy Allison. Photo © Jeremy Allison, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
A generous group of individuals has banded together to increase the amount of our match donation. This post is part of a series of interviews where these extraordinary folks tell us about why they care about software freedom and why they support Conservancy.
We asked Jeremy Allison to describe himself for this interview, and he described himself as "a tedious audiophile who torments his friends with esoteric speaker trivia. He also likes to write C code and tries really hard not to put security holes in it. He co-founded the Samba project, whose list of CVE reports shows he is failing at this task. For some odd reason, Google thinks he is worth employing."
In this interview, Jeremy talks about how he got started in free software and the Samba project, and says some awfully nice things about Conservancy's board and staff!
Interview with Matcher Daniel Vetter
by on January 13, 2021
Portrait of Daniel Vetter. Photo © Roland Beck, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
A generous group of individuals has banded together to increase the amount of our match donation. This post is part of a series of interviews where these extraordinary folks tell us about why they care about software freedom and why they support Conservancy.
Daniel Vetter works on making graphics drivers better on Linux. At first largely by improving the code, nowadays he's focused on doing this by trying to build a better community. In this interview, Daniel talks about community building, copyleft and his favorite Conservancy member project, Outreachy!
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