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 Becomes an Open Source Initiative Affiliate Member
March 14, 2019
Conservancy joins a long list of Open Source Initiative Affiliate Members. We believe that the non-profits serving free and open source software communities should seek out ways to support each other. There are certainly many different strategies that help us build and maintain a robust commons and a solid consistent understanding of the licenses that enable collaborative development is critical. The Open Source Initiative's role as steward of the Open Source Definition is extremely compatible with our own work to provide a fiscal home for community-driven free software projects and our ongoing work to enforce the General Public License (GPL).
We're Hiring: Techie Bookkeeper
February 14, 2019
Thanks to the help of all of our donors and Supporters, Conservancy is hiring for a critical position in our organization. Please help us spread the word, and if this is a position you're interested in please apply!
Techie Bookkeeper
Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for a new employee to help us with important work that supports our basic operations. Conservancy is a nonprofit charity that promotes and improves free and open source software projects. We are home to almost 50 projects, including Git, Inkscape, Etherpad, phpMyAdmin, and Selenium (to name a few). Conservancy is the home of Outreachy, an award winning diversity intiative, and we also work hard to improve software freedom generally. We are a small but dedicated staff, handling a very large number of financial transactions per year for us and our member projects.
We seek a fifth full-time employee who will help us with our day-to-day bookkeeping needs. Our bookkeeping system is unique in that it requires technical skill to use. We hope that our new employee will help us with our bookkeeping needs today and in the future grow and develop along with the organization.
Copyleft Conf: Registration is Open
...and the Schedule is Posted
January 10, 2019
Conservancy is very excited to share the schedule for the first ever Copyleft Conf with you! Copyleft Conf is a one day event, taking place in downtown Brussels at Digityser. Registration begins at 9:30am and we'll be finishing by 6pm. We'll have talks, a panel and participatory discussions near the end of the day.
Participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics — will be welcomed for an in-depth, high bandwidth, and expert-level discussion about the day-to-day details of using copyleft licensing, obstacles facing copyleft and the future of copyleft as a strategy to advance and defend software freedom for users and developers around the world.
Conservancy Blog
Conservancy at LibrePlanet this Weekend
by on March 20, 2019
This weekend, the Free Software Foundation hosts its 11th annual LibrePlanet conference on March 23-24. The event takes place at the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge”
by on March 13, 2019
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation launched a new service, called “Community Bridge” — an ambitious platform that promises a self-service system to handle finances, address security issues, manage CLAs and license compliance, and also bring mentorship to projects. These tasks are difficult work that typically require human intervention, so we understand the allure of automating them; we and our peer organizations have long welcomed newcomers to this field and have together sought collaborative assistance for these issues. Indeed, Community Bridge's offerings bear some similarity to the work of organizations like Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Software in the Public Interest and Conservancy. People have already begun to ask us to compare this initiative to our work and the work of our peer organizations. This blog post hopefully answers those questions and anticipated similar questions.
Join Conservancy at SCALE!
by on March 4, 2019
Next weekend, our President and Distinguished Technologist, Bradley Kuhn, will be in Pasadena for the seventeenth annual edition of the Southern California Linux Expo aka SCALE. SCALE is a community-run conference that starts on Thursday. March 7th and concludes on Sunday, March 10th.
Successful First Copyleft Conf!
by on February 22, 2019
Last year, in FOSDEM's Legal & Policy Devroom , we promised to hold an event co-located with the 2019 FOSDEM to have more in depth discussion around the legal issues that we care about as a community and in particular, copyleft. We made good on that promise and this year the first annual Copyleft Conf took place on February 4th. About 150 people came to the event from copyleft enthusiasts to the "copyleft curious." The venue, DigitYser was funky and accessible and walking distance from many downtown Brussels hotels.
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Learn More about Conservancy
An Overview of Conservancy… Conservancy's current member projects… Services Conservancy provides to its member projects… Conservancy's unique work defending and upholding copyleft licenses (e.g., the GPL) … Conservancy's Non-Profit Accounting Project …
