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
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 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).
Conservancy Blog
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.
Conservancy News Round-up
by on April 17, 2019
Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Do You Know Where Your Code Came From? If You Don't Have Source You Aren't Secure
by on April 4, 2019
I sometimes work for Conservancy assisting in their compliance work. Conservancy follows the Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement, enforcement principles published by Conservancy and the Free Software Foundation. As the process goes, Conservancy receives complaints from users about products whose sellers aren't meeting their GPL license obligations and Conservancy may investigate. Many of these complaints are for hardware devices with embedded code. The complaints are almost always are that there is free software on the device but that the source code is not available.
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