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Conservancy BlogDisplaying posts
by Daniel Takamori
by on December 27, 2021
This fundraising season we were incredibly fortunate to be supported by so many individuals. In addition to our large anonymous donors, we had a few people contribute to bump up the number. One of donors was a board member, Mark Galassi, who runs The Institute for Computing in Research. We asked him a few questions about free software and his passion and motivations for interdisciplinary research.
Software Freedom Conservancy: “Why do you care about software freedom?”
Mark Galassi: “I started working on developing software for others to use in 1984. At that time my brother and some friends of ours worked to develop a public access UNIX system so that people who were not in a university or big company could have the joy of doing advanced computing.
Soon after a fellow student at Reed College pointed me to the birth of the free software movement, and its goal and principle perfectly matched what I thought was important for the world.
A robust idea can last a long time, and more than 35 years later I feel that just as strongly.”
SFC: “What is it that you see Software Freedom Conservancy does that other groups are not?”
MG: “Conservancy is firmly focused on the importance of software freedom, while at the same time carrying out practical steps to allow it to flourish. It also expands and adapts its role as new areas become relevant to software freedom, as the embracing of Outreachy and the Institute for Computing in Research have shown.
I'm not sure if I would say that other organizations are not doing important things: we benefit from other orgs in various ways. But combining stewardship and principle and adaptation is hard work, and I think that only Conservancy takes it on in full.”
SFC: “How do you see our role amongst the various FOSS organizations?”
MG: “I think that Conservancy should lead other FOSS organizations in a few ways. At least:
SFC: “Do you think we do a good job standing up to the organizations with more corporate funding?”
MG: “Yes. The current action against Vizio's violations renews that clarity.”
SFC: “What's got you most excited from the past year of our work?”
MG: “I am particularly excited by Conservancy's picking up of the Institute for Computing in Research (2021 was our first full year as part of Conservancy). This addition of a focus on free software in the academic world will be important: the free software movement was born in the research and university world, and I believe that academic research should be the steady keel of the free software movement.”
SFC: “Have you been involved with any of our member projects in the past?”
MG: “Yes: I have used many of Conservancy's member projects over the years, and I am co-founder of the Institute for Computing in Research.”
SFC: “What other (non-tech) organizations are you supporting this year?”
MG: “I donate a bit to my college, and I donate to Planned Parenthood, but Conservancy and the Institute are where I donated the most this year.”
SFC: “Why did you start the Institute for Computing in Research? How did you wind up teaching kids these important skills?”
MG: “I have loved my career so much that it seems impossible.
Here is how that happened:
I entered the world of physics just at the time when computing was becoming a key part of research (since then this has extended to all other academic areas). The free software movement was born at the same time. Being a free software developer, I was in a position to promote the use of FOSS in research, and to really love the research work because I did not have to use proprietary software.
When you love something so much, you want to pass on the recipe that makes it work so well -- in my case that has been the use of advanced software development based on free software, applied to academic research.”
SFC: “As the chair of Software Freedom Conservancy's board, what unique place do you think we have in the field of FLOSS organizations?”
MG: “I enjoy serving on the board, and my fellow board members are a cross-section of all that is amazing in the world of research and development.
But more than us, I think that our staff has the real angle on what's important: in many ways they teach us what is happening and what should happen in the world. So maybe one of the coordinates of our "unique place" is that Karen and Bradley have created a staff of world class thought leaders who also do detailed practical work.”
SFC: “You are a strong proponent of interdisciplinary research, what avenues do you think free software has to help promote both academic and civil freedom?”
MG: “Ahhh, the academic side is an easy one: research software can only be free software, for all the reasons that makes science honest. This is already mostly true, but we need to go the rest of the way.
You also ask about civil freedom. What is also quite clear to me is that corporate control and vendor lock-in are real problems in any society. They are the cause of a good amount of economic and cultural alienation. Most of this lock-in is in software, and software freedom is our strongest tool against that.”
SFC: “Given your academic background, what are your thoughts on projects like Reproducible Builds and the effects it might have on reproducibility in the academic community?”
MG: “Reproducible builds is one of the coolest projects we have in Conservancy - both its fundamental idea, and the impressive intelligence of the people working on it. Much of its motivation comes from the security angle, but a sign of a deep project is that other important angles naturally come up. In my case, for example, I talk to members of the project regularly to get advice on how to improve reproducibility in research software. They also help me think about how to frame those issues.”
by on June 21, 2021
Last Thursday we launched our new chat platform chat.sfconservancy.org! Conservancy's main chat room, which used to be on Freenode, is now available at the following locations:
We've taken the opportunity of leaving Freenode to change technologies to something we think reflects our ideals. XMPP is a decentralized, open standard and widely used chat platform that supports many of the common features we've come to expect in the new era of chat. Given that we've been using IRC, almost anything would be a strict upgrade when it comes to features. We also wanted to make it as easy as possible for newcomers to start chatting.
We evaluated and tested a multitude of options: XMPP, Matrix, RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, ircv3, etc and permutations of bridging support. Given the near parity of features that we care about (we even support reactions now 👍), some reasons we chose XMPP over the others are the longevity and fundamental independence of the XMPP protocol, that we found the matrix-bifrost bridge to work better with Matrix users coming in to XMPP than XMPP users joining Matrix channels (but hope in the future to see this support get better!) and staff familiarity with XMPP. There is also a really healthy and growing ecosystem of XMPP clients and you'll find some recommendations below.
Note: similarly to IRC, your connection to the XMPP server is encrypted, but due to the nature of chat rooms, we cannot provide E2E encryption of the channel itself. Nevertheless here are a list of clients that support OMEMO (which is the standard for E2E encryption for XMPP).
And here are some other tools which I think are interesting:
We're excited about the possibilities of what XMPP will bring our community. Specifically helping our projects use more free software where possible. Communication is one area that we particularly think is important to remain free and in our (collective) hands. The proliferation of chat software over the years is a well noted problem, and this is one area that free software both outperforms proprietary options and promotes interoperating standards and giving back the freedom of users to use the software that works for them.
So which ever client and connection you choose, we're excited to hear from you 💻🌉💻
by on May 18, 2021
Hi there, my name is Daniel Pono Takamori and I'm the new Community Organizer and Nonprofit Problem Solver here at Conservancy! My background is in running free software as infrastructure so you might've filed a ticket with me somewhere in the past :) I'm looking forward to this new non-technical role as community support. Being able to bring my skills to help further software freedom here at Conservancy is a very exciting new chapter to me. With projects ranging from programming languages to make programming languages, to community building and mentorship programs, the breadth and spread of projects is incredible. Conservancy projects really help keep you grounded in the varied relationships all people have with software. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to learn from people with different backgrounds, approaches and lived experiences.I recently gave a keynote at SeaGL 2020 and found the experience of being able to share my non-technical thoughts about technical subjects very invigorating. Speaking more to the human experience of computing technology and the effects computers can have on us. It's with this lens that I hope to bring a more nuanced and compassionate view to the world of software freedom. It's easy to get lost in the billion dollar industries that rely on our labor, but at the end of the day we are people working together with people.
Going forward in this new remote friendlier world, I'm hopeful for more accessible communication. Both with remote friendly conferences, more free software being used to communicate and a more universal understanding that we are people first. While my day to day will probably be lots of email and meetings, I'm excited to find ways to help augment communities with tools like Apache STeVe and freeing projects from proprietary communication tools. Please help me help you by letting us know how Conservancy can be better. Whether it's a more active social media presence, IRC office hours, or if there's an event or project you think we should know about.
I can't believe that after volunteering with Conservancy and contributing to member projects, I now have the honor of championing the great work that WE do.