2015 YIR: Bradley and Karen Speak at FOSDEM 2015

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 16, 2015

[ This is a blog post is the third in our series, Conservancy 2015: Year in Review . ]

At the end of January 2015, Bradley and Karen came back from LCA and left almost immediately for FOSDEM 2015, where they co-organized the FOSDEM 2015 Legal & Policies Issues DevRoom with Tom Marble and Richard Fontana. Karen gave an amazing FOSDEM-wide keynote (in the giant room :) entitled Identity Crisis: Are we who we say we are?, and Bradley gave a talk in the DevRoom.

Sadly, it looks like the cameras were not functioning for Karen's keynote, but you can read her interview with the FOSDEM organizers about the talk. Fortunately, there is video for Bradley's talk, entitled Fork and Ignore: Fighting a GPL Violation By Coding Instead (The Story of Kallithea). The video of the talk is included here (and is also available on Youtube). The slides aren't clear on the video, but you can follow along with the slides on Bradley's website.)

Bradley's talk in particular tells a story of one of Conservancy's successes from the previous year, the launch of the Kallithea project. Just a few weeks ago, Conservancy launched its own Kallithea instance for Conservancy's public repositories.

Karen and Bradley are again co-organizers of the Legal & Policy DevRoom at FODEM 2016.

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, Kallithea, Year In Review 2015

First Two Conservancy Members, Samba & Wine, Ask You to Support Conservancy

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 15, 2015

Last week, we shared a video from Jeremy Allison, co-founder of Samba, encouraging you to become a Conservancy Supporter today. As many know, Samba and Wine were the first two projects to join Conservancy directly after our founding in early 2006. Today, we share this video where Wine project contributor asks you to become a Conservancy Supporter.

Both Wine and Samba are in the unique position to tell you, that after 10 years of receiving services from Conservancy, they really want us to continue. You can make sure that happens by signing up as a Supporter right now.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

2015 YIR: Bradley M. Kuhn Speaks About Future of Copyleft

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 12, 2015

[ This is a blog post is the second in our series, Conservancy 2015: Year in Review ]

Thanks to the generosity of the LinuxConf Australia (LCA) organizers, who funded both Karen's and Bradley's visit to LinuxConf AU 2015, both were able to attend and speak at LCA 2015. Yesterday, our Year In Review post included a video of Karen Sandler's talk at LCA 2015. Today's video shows Bradley M. Kuhn's talk, Considering the Future of Copyleft: How Will The Next Generation Perceive the GPL?, which was delivered on 15 January 2015.

Copyleft licenses, particularly the GPL, are widely used throughout the Open Source and Free Software communities. Recent debates have led many to various conclusions about the popularity of copyleft. This talk discusses where copyleft stands today, how it interacts with the modern Free Software world, and how copyleft advocates may need to adapt to the future of Free Software licensing.

Specifically, Bradley gives a historical perspective of how the Open Source and Free Software communities perceive copyleft now, and why they do. He discusses what challenges this history leaves for the current situation in software freedom politics. Told with examples from his own twenty years of work in our community, Bradley describes the political challenges facing copyleft and what we as a community should do about it.

Bradley will premiere a follow-up talk to this one, entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan at LinuxConf Australia 2016.

This video is also available on on Youtube and in as a direct download in webm format.

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, Year In Review 2015

2015 YIR: Karen Sandler Speaks about IRS Charity Issues

by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on December 11, 2015

[ This is a blog post is the first in our series, Conservancy 2015: Year in Review. ]

Conservancy's 2015 started with the filing of our FY 2013 Form 990. That's the IRS tax(-exempt) form that every charity and trade association in the USA must file annually. Typically, most non-profits ask for the two three-month extensions for filing deadline for the Form 990, and since Conservancy's fiscal year ends in February, our Form 990 is filed by 15 January.

This is the type of essential work that Conservancy does for our member projects. Each member project need not file their own complicated forms to maintain their charitable status and ability to accept earmarked donations for their projects. Instead, Conservancy files one Form 990. We're “looking forward” to spending this holiday season preparing our next FY 2014 Form 990 and completing our mandated annual audit. (Our FY 2013 annual audit is of course already available.)

Fitting with this annual work that Conservancy does, immediately after filing the 990, both Karen and Bradley — thanks to generous travel funding by the conference — quickly boarded flights to LinuxConf Australia in Auckland, New Zealand. At the conference, on the very date of Conservancy's IRS filing deadline, Karen gave talk entitled The Low Down on IRS status for Free and Open Source Software Nonprofits in the US.

Even almost a year later, many of the issues Karen discussed in her talk are not well known in the Free Software community and there are still many confusions in the Open Source and Free Software community about non-profit status and how it works. Enjoy this video now to see more about what Conservancy does for its member projects, and generally to learn more about how both charities and trade associations operate and what they do in our community.

Become a Conservancy Supporter now to help us continue this work in 2016!

The video in this post is also available on Youtube.

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Tags: conservancy, Filings, Year In Review 2015