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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts by Deb Nicholson
Conservancy Activities: March and Beyond
by on February 19, 2020
Open Source 101 is brought to you by the fine folks who put on All Things Open every fall. Deb will be giving a 90 minute workshop at the locally-focused event titled, Software Licensing and Compliance: It’s All About Community on March 3rd, in Columbia, SC. The number of available tickets is limited, but some are still available here.
Denver is keynoting Git Merge where folks will be celebrating Git's 15th Anniversary! He'll be discussing the History & Future of Git. The sixth annual Git Merge will be hosted at The Majestic Downtown in Los Angeles on March 4th. Ticket proceeds will again be donated to the Software Freedom Conservancy. (Thanks!)
Just a few days later, Bradley will be presenting at the Southern California Linux Expo, aka SCaLE, a long-running FOSS community event in Los Angeles on, What'll We Do When FOSS Licenses Jump the Shark?. Join him on Saturday, March 7th.
Denver and Bradley will be at the Conservancy booth at SCaLE! We love seeing supporters and connecting with new software freedom enthusiasts at community-driven events like this one. Helping us greet folks by volunteering at the booth is a great way to support our work. The expo floor will be open from 2:00pm on Friday, March 6 until 2:00pm on Sunday, March 8. Please write to us about when you can help out.
In June, Bradley is keynoting the annual OpenFOAM Workshop with a talk about how the GPL impacts the OpenFOAM community. The Call for Papers and Registration are open now.
The next Outreachy round is also coming up! In fact, applications for the May to August 2020 round are due February 25 at 4pm UTC. Feel free to share Outreachy's opportunities with interested folks in your network!
Conservancy is headed to Brussels
by on January 24, 2020
Greetings software freedom friends! We will again be in Brussels for FOSDEM and the Second Annual Copyleft Conf. We would love to see you while we're there so here are few of the places and times where you can find us.
FOSDEM
Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler and our Policy Fellow, Bradley M. Kuhn are half of the team behind Saturday's popular and long-running Legal & Policy DevRoom. This year the DevRoom will have debates on critical current topics. Sustainability, the relevance of the Open Source Definition, privacy and open hardware are just a few that will be covered. In past years this room has gotten full, so savvy attendees should show up a little early for the sessions they want to catch.
On Sunday, Conservancy staff have two talks in the Community Devroom run by Leslie Hawthorn, Laura Czajkowski and Shirley Bailes. Our Director of Community Operations, Deb Nicholson will be discussing Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism just before lunch, and near the end of the day Bradley looks at how Innersource might affect the future of upstream contributions.
Conservancy will also have a stand all day on Sunday in K level 2 (we are in group E). Come by, say hi, load up on stickers, share some FLOSSip, etc. We could also use a few volunteers at the booth. If you like talking about free software and you can help out for an hour or two, please get in touch!
Conservancy projects Godot and Coreboot also have stands at FOSDEM so be sure to swing by and see what they've got going on.
Second Annual Copyleft Conf
Copyleft Conf is a one day conference on February 3rd, dedicated to -- you guessed it -- copyleft licensing! We'll be discussing theory, practice and the future of copyleft in a friendly and welcoming environment. Porfessional tickets are $200, student/under-employed/non-profit employee tickets are just $20. Both tickets include coffee and tea in the morning as well as lunch. You're going to want to register in advance so that we can get a solid headcount for lunch and get everyone checked in quickly in the morning. Please get in touch if $20 is prohibitive for you.
We could also use volunteers onsite for Copyleft Conf. Volunteer tasks include; helping with registration, time-keeping and recording. Email us if you can pitch in with these important tasks.
Bonus!
Deb is also keynoting CHAOSScon on the Friday before FOSDEM starts. She'll be talking about ethics and metrics. If you're in town early and want to join, the conference organizers recommend registering as soon as possible because space is limited.
We Met Our Biggest Match Yet and Welcomed One Hundred New Supporters!
by on January 17, 2020
Thanks to everyone who helped us meet our match this year! This year's match was the biggest yet and I gotta tell you, that last week was a little bit of a nail biter, but you all really came through. Thanks so much to David Turner and Danielle Sucher, Leslie Hawthorn, Martin Krafft, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Mark Wielaard, Bdale Garbee, Private Internet Access and one Anonymous donor. You helped us inspire both returning folks and new folks to donate which helps us achieve software freedom for everyone.
Thanks to everyone who shared our posts and talked to people about our work to support alternatives to proprietary software, to build a bigger, more diverse free software movement and defend free software. We don't buy lists or otherwise try to figure out how to spam folks we don't know so we really, really appreciate it when you share our mission with like-minded friends and colleagues. We had hoped to sign up 100 new Supporters and because of all of you, we did it!
Thanks especially to Chris Lemmer-Webber! They designed our post card, our online holiday card and made the art for our "sign up three friends promotion." (By the way, you can still get that prize if you sign up three friends early this year.)
Thanks also to Wine! They gave us a bottle of wine, signed by the Wine project to offer as a donor prize.
We don't employ a full-time fundraiser or marketer at Conservancy so we do most of our fundraising in one big push. Thanks so much to everyone who helped us make this year's campaign so successful!
Wine Wednesday: Donate to help Conservancy and win a special potable prize!
by on January 7, 2020
Our highest donor on Wednesday wins a bottle of wine... signed by the Wine developers. Put your donation bid in now!
Photo by Karen Sandler, available under a CC.BY.SA license
For our Conservancy supporters who are legally allowed to drink, we have a fun challenge. One of our projects is named Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), and they help developers compile Windows applications for Unix-like (including free software) environments. Wine is invaluable for folks who must run one or two non-free things for work or some other collaboration but would prefer not to run a whole proprietary operating system.
ANYWAY. They have also given us a bottle of wine (the beverage) to give away[1]. The bottle has been signed by Wine's lead developers at the 2019 WineConf. Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler spoke there about Wine and Conservancy. Check her out with the Wine folks below!
Tomorrow's highest donation (on Wednesday, aka TODAY), wins the wine. Donations must be at least $50 and you must be of legal drinking age where you live. You must be able to receive wine in the mail or be willing to help us arrange to get it to you via our global network of software freedom advocates and pals. Staff is also happy to try to deliver the wine in person at any of the free software events we're attending this year. All donations must be received by 11:59pm AoE.
Photo by Francois Gouget
Thanks for participating in Wine Wednesday! Your donations on Wednesday (and through the 15th) will be doubled by our generous matching donors. Put your donation bid in now!
[1] Little known fact: it turns out that most Wine developers prefer beer!
