Conservancy’s Member Projects Ask for Your Support

by Conservancy's Staff on December 8, 2017

Outreachy, North Bay Python, LibreHealth, Sugar, Wine, Linux XIA, Xapian, Homebrew, and Git all ask you to support Conservancy. Become a Supporter today while your donation counts twice!

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Tags: conservancy, supporter, Member Projects

NPO Accounting Software for Currency Conversions

by Brett Smith on November 22, 2017

Conservancy helps project participants from all over the world travel to all kinds of conferences and hackfests (around 150 people in 2017!). Because of that, our day-to-day accounting work can involve a lot of currency conversions. Someone on a single trip might have expenses in multiple currencies, and want to be reimbursed in another currency different from all of those.

We previously used rates published by the Bank of Canada to do these conversions. It was a trustworthy source of data, but it wasn’t very user-friendly: we had to go through a multipart web form to get rates, save those in our records, and then convert amounts by hand. When they stopped publishing rates earlier this year, one thing we hoped to find in a replacement was an API that we could use to build some higher-level accounting tooling.

We evaluated several alternatives and found what we wanted in Open Exchange Rates. In particular, it has a historical rates API that meets our needs very well: give it a date, and it returns all the rates for that date in a JSON object. It’s easy to save those results in our books, and use the data for higher-level conversions.

I wrote oxrlib as the tooling we needed on top of that API. It starts as a simple command-line wrapper over the API: give it a date, and it shows you all the rates for that date. From there, you can pass more arguments to answer more specific questions. Name a currency or two, and it will show you the rates between just those currencies. Add an amount, and it will convert that amount from one currency to the other. It can even output all this information in the same format our Ledger books use, so it’s easy to insert directly into an entry we’re working on. All this functionality has already reduced the amount of time we spend processing reimbursement requests. A process that used to require several tools, copying data by hand between them, is now handled by a single command.

My bigger hope is that it will save us even more time developing more NPO Accounting tools. I put “lib” in the name “oxrlib” for a reason: it’s a fully-fledged Python module that I’ve developed with an eye toward reusing in the future. All the functionality we have today in the command-line wrapper should be easy to incorporate into other tools in the future. oxrlib gives us a starting point to automate bookkeeping in multiple currencies. I’m hopeful this pattern will let us make useful incremental progress on NPO Accounting. Today we build small, practical, reusable pieces that solve an immediate problem. Tomorrow we can use those to build more fully-featured programs that solve bigger problems.

You can find oxrlib on our Kallithea Git server, and even use it today with an account and API key from Open Exchange Rates. Expect to hear from me again soon about more NPO Accounting tools like this.

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Tags: conservancy, Accounting

SFLC Files Bizarre Legal Action Against Its Former Client, Software Freedom Conservancy

by Conservancy's Staff on November 3, 2017

About a month ago, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the not-for-profit law firm which launched Conservancy in 2006 and served as Conservancy's law firm until July 2011, took the bizarre and frivolous step of filing a legal action in the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking cancellation of Conservancy's trademark for our name, “Software Freedom Conservancy”. We were surprised by this spurious action. In our eleven years of coexistence, SFLC has raised no concerns nor complaints about our name, nor ever asked us to change it. We filed our formal answer to SFLC's action yesterday. In the interest of transparency for our thousands of volunteers, donors, Supporters, and friends, we at Conservancy today decided to talk publicly about the matter.

SFLC's action to cancel our trademark initiated a process nearly identical to litigation. As such, our legal counsel has asked us to limit what we say about the matter. However, we pride ourselves on our commitment to transparency. In those rare instances when we initiated or funded legal action — to defend the public interest through GPL enforcement — we have been as candid as possible about the circumstances. We always explain the extent to which we exhausted other possible solutions, and why we chose litigation as the last resort.

Currently, this trademark action is in its early stages. SFLC filed a petition on September 22. Yesterday, we provided an answer that lists defenses that we plan to use. However, we welcome press inquiries and interviews on the subject and will do our best to respond and engage in public discussion when possible.

We are surprised and sad that our former attorneys, who kindly helped our organization start in our earliest days and later excitedly endorsed us when we moved from a volunteer organization to a staffed one, would seek to invalidate our trademark. Conservancy and SFLC are very different organizations and sometimes publicly disagree about detailed policy issues. Yet, both non-profits are charities organized to promote the public's interest. Thus, we are especially disappointed that SFLC would waste the precious resources of both organizations in this frivolous action.

Meanwhile, there is now widespread agreement in the FLOSS community, embodied both in the FSF's and Conservancy's Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement and the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement, that FLOSS community members view “legal action as a last resort, to be initiated only when other community efforts have failed to resolve the problem.” We at Conservancy have always adhered to this fundamental principle, not only in GPL enforcement, but in all endeavors. In stark contrast, SFLC made no efforts — over the last eleven years since Conservancy was formed, nor in the last five years since we registered our name as a trademark — to express any concerns about our name, or a desire for us to change our name. We first learned of SFLC's complaints from this surprise attack of legal action.

SFLC's actions indicate that while they have provided legal services to some members of our FLOSS community, they do not view themselves as members of our FLOSS community, nor consider themselves bound by our community's norms. We are prepared to defend our brand, not just for ourselves but for our many member projects who have their home at Conservancy, our Outreachy diversity initiative, and our collective efforts to promote FLOSS. Nevertheless, we hope SFLC will see the error of their ways and withdraw the action, so that both organizations can refocus resources on serving the public.

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Tags: conservancy, law

Join me at Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit!

by Bradley M. Kuhn on November 2, 2017

I'm delighted to be en route to Oslo, Norway as I write this post. I'll be speaking this weekend at FSCONS, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit. FSCONS is admittedly a small event, but has a theme that is absolutely intriguing and incredibly important to the future of software freedom. As can be read on the FSCONS website, the conference looks at the intersection of society, culture and technology. They invite speakers from throughout the Open Source and Free Software world as well as Free Culture and privacy and other technology activists.

I'll be giving a talk entitled The Crumbling Intellectual Infrastructure of Free Software & Free Culture Licensing. My talk will explore the history of Free Software and Free Culture licensing, how it relates to rise of for-profit popularity of Open Source, and the larger political and societal implications of where we are now. Admittedly the title sounds bleak, and I'm certainly known for my pessimistic talks about the future of software freedom, but I'll also include suggestions and ideas for activists to work to solve the problems our community now faces.

I want to thank in advance the great work of the organizers of FSCONS. Not only are they funding travel for speakers, but they've sent numerous clear and understandable emails about the weekend's events. It's made my planning smooth and easy.

I really encourage you to join us in Oslo this weekend; tickets are still available, and I did a quick check and round-trip flights from major cities in Europe this weekend to Oslo are around €200. I think it's well worth the trip! See you there!

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Tags: conservancy, conferences