Evaluation Committee

The Evaluation Committee evaluates projects that have applied to become members of Conservancy. Conservancy's Board of Directors formally charters and authorizes this Committee to offer membership to projects that apply for membership in Conservancy.

Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.

He works for CIQ as a Distinguished Engineer, working on Open Source code.

Tom Callaway

Tom Callaway has been working for Red Hat since 2001. He started in Sales Engineering and has been the Fedora Engineering Manager since 2008. He served three consecutive elected terms on the Fedora Board from 2007 to 2011. Tom also maintains or co-maintains a large number of Packages in Fedora (currently 390) and is leading the Fedora Packaging Committee, responsible for RPM Packaging Standards and Practices. Additionally, he is responsible for managing Fedora's Legal issues. Tom frequently represents Fedora and Free Software at conferences around the world, and tries his best not to make too big of a fool of himself.

When not working, Tom enjoys geocaching, ice hockey, gaming, science fiction, and pinball.

Mark Galassi

Mark Galassi has been involved in the GNU project since 1984. He currently works as a researcher in the International, Space, and Response division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he has worked on the HETE-2 satellite, ISIS/Genie, the Raptor telescope, the Swift satellite, and the muon tomography project. In 1997 Mark took a couple of years off from Los Alamos (where he was previously in the ISR division and the Theoretical Astrophysics group) to work for Cygnus (now a part of Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos, although he continued working on the HETE-2 satellite (an astrophysical Gamma Ray Burst mission) part time. Mark earned his BA in Physics at Reed College and a PhD from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook.

Bdale Garbee

Bdale Garbee is a technologist and community builder. He has deep connections to free and open source software communities, having been an early participant in the Debian community and board member of Software in the Public Interest for a decade. He also has substantial coporate experience in the field, and has recently retired (for the second time) from an impressive career at HP/HPE. Garbee also serves on the boards of the Freedombox Foundation and Aleph Objects. He is a co-founder of Altus Metrum, LLC, is a small business that designs, builds, and sells completely open hardware and open source avionics solutions for use in high power model rockets. Garbee is a frequent speaker and presence at free and open source software events.

Bradley M. Kuhn

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn began as Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and became its first staff person in 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Tom Marble

Tom Marble is best known for being the first “OpenJDK Ambassador” on the Sun Microsystems core team that open sourced the Java programming language. He continues to apply his community experiences in open source projects and his interest in intellectual property by co-organizing the legal and policy issues track at Europe's largest open source conference, FOSDEM. Marble is committed to increasing diversity in technology by volunteering as an organizer for ClojureBridge, a weekend workshop for women to learn the Clojure programming language, as well as Debian's participation in Outreachy. He is the founder of Informatique, Inc., a consultancy which leverages his hardware, software and legal engineering background for client projects as diverse as telematics for electric vehicles, probabilistic model checking, autonomous cyber defense, and multiplayer online gaming.

Karen Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of Conservancy. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. In partnership with the GNOME Foundation, Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women. Prior to taking up this position, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.