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
Rosanne DiMesio is Conservancy's New Technical Bookkeeper
June 13, 2019
We're excited to announce that we've hired Rosanne DiMesio to be our new Technical Bookkeeper. Rosanne is a longtime volunteer with the Wine project (which was one of Conservancy's founding member projects) where she focuses her efforts on making things easier for users. She is also an Outreachy (also a Conservancy project) graduate who completed her internship working with Wine on improving their Applications Database (AppDB). Rosanne has done many different things during her career, including working as an English teacher and doing tech support for emergency response services. She brings her passion for free software and her care for new free software users to the role at Conservancy.
VMware Suit Concludes in Germany
VMware Announces Plans to Remove Non-complying Code, Hellwig Decides Not to Appeal
April 2, 2019
Today, Christoph Hellwig announced the conclusion of his case against VMware in Germany. The Hamburg Higher Regional Court affirmed the lower court's decision, which dismissed the case on purely procedural grounds; they did not address the main question of the case. (The February 28th decision can be found here.) Hellwig has decided with his legal counsel, Till Jaeger, and after conferring with Conservancy, to not appeal the case further in German courts.
Deb Nicholson Receives the Award for the Advancement of Free Software
March 25, 2019
We are proud to announce that our Director of Community Operations, Deb Nicholson, won this year's Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The award was presented on Saturday, March 23rd at LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation's annual conference at MIT's Stata Center. The Free Software Foundation gives out two awards each year, one for the Advancement of Free Software and one for Projects of Social Benefit.
Conservancy Blog
How We Worked on Eliminating Bias in Our Hiring Process: A Small Organization's Story
by on June 20, 2019
We recently hired our newest employee at Conservancy, a Technical Bookkeeper. Adding one more employee to our small staff is a significant change for our organization and we wanted to conduct both an efficient and as unbiased as possible hiring process. This can be a challenge for small organizations and there must be agreement around this goal as well as a willingness to stick to a slightly more formal process. Everyone here at Conservancy was committed to crafting a process designed to remove as much bias as possible from the equation, so here's what we did.
Conservancy News Round-up
by on May 28, 2019
May is for code releases! Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Chasing Quick Fixes To Sustainability
by on May 23, 2019
Today, another for-profit company, GitHub, announced their sponsors program. We're glad that GitHub is taking seriously the issue of assuring that those doing the work in FOSS are financially supported. We hope that GitHub will ultimately facilitate charities as payees, so that Conservancy membership projects can benefit. We realize the program is in beta, but over all we are concerned that the fundamental approach of this new program fails to address any of the major issues that charities, in our study of this problem for many years, continue to identify in FOSS sustainability.
Choosing a GPLv3-termination Backport to GPLv2
by on May 11, 2019
About four years ago, Conservancy (in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation) published the Principles of Community-Oriented GPL enforcement. Our goal was to conduct our enforcement ethically and respectfully, treating today's violators as tomorrow's contributors. Accordingly, the Principles advocate a holistic approach to GPL enforcement that truly seeks to gain GPL compliance to advance software freedom. We were excited that there was substantial interest in codifying these long standing ad-hoc Principles into a widely adopted and published consensus. In this blog post, we analyze two different efforts to “backport” the GPLv3 termination provisions to GPLv2.
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