Sumana Harihareswara Explains What Conservancy Does & Why She Supports Us

by Bradley M. Kuhn on December 22, 2015

In this video, Sumana Harihareswara gives a nice introduction to Conservancy, and explains why she supports Conservancy. Sumana explains Conservancy's work in a way that's easy to understand for those who are new to issues surrounding software freedom, so this is a great video to share with your friends and family this holiday season to convince them to join you in supporting Conservancy.

(Also available on YouTube.)

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

2015 YIR: Conservancy Wins DMCA Exception for Smart TVs

by Bradley M. Kuhn on December 18, 2015

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

For 7 years, culminating in a major victory this year, Conservancy has fought for your right to do cool things with your digital television. As part of the review process for exceptions to the DMCA, Conservancy fought for and won an exception for so-called “Smart TVs”.

In early February 2015, Conservancy filed a formal long form comment with the Copyright office, following up on our initial petition in 2014.

We continued in this process, even though we have extremely limited resources compared to other organizations working in this area. We funded travel expenses for our pro-bono attorney on this matter, Aaron Williamson of Tor Ekland P.C., to testify at a hearing on the matter.

In October, our hard work yielded success. The Copyright Office granted the exception in their issued ruling.

What does that mean for your software freedom? If you own a television with a digital Linux-based firmware on it, you can extract that firmware, and figure out how to replace it with a more Free-Software-friendly firmware stack like SamyGo without fearing a DMCA violation.

The road to this type of software freedom was even longer for Conservancy. We sued Samsung (along with many other defendants) back in 2008, and assured that Samsung released the copylefted components in their firmware. Like the OpenWRT project, the SamyGo project exists thanks to active GPL enforcement by non-profit charities like Conservancy. With this DMCA exception, we can be assured of a clear and equal playing field for hobbyists and life-hackers who wish to modify the devices in their home.

Would you like us to continue this important work? This is precisely the type of activity we'll cut from our budget if we don't get meet our target of 2,500 Supporters.

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, Year In Review 2015

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