Conservancy Supporters!

by Karen Sandler on April 20, 2015

I just have to share this picture from last week in Barcelona. It was fantastic to see Conservancy Supporters showing off their shirts and by proxy their support of Conservancy's activities. I was so happy to hear so much positive feedback on the VMWare lawsuit, filed by Christoph Hellwig. Last month, Donald Robertson got a round of applause during my LibrePlanet keynote just for wearing a Conservancy t-shirt! When we first launched the Supporter program I wrote about how impressed I was by the caliber of the intitial wave of Supporters, and as you can see from the notable folks in this picture, the trend has continued as we more than double our numbers. You can get yours by becoming a Conservancy Supporter today!

Thanks Stefano, John, and Jim plus Carlo Piana for taking the photo!

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

My Favorite Time to Support Charitable Nonpofits

by Karen Sandler on April 15, 2015

Most nonprofits push for donations in December to try to cash in on the giving spirit and the end of the calendar year deadline for tax deductions. Conservancy is no exception - we launched our Supporter program at the beginning of December and promoted that as much as we could until the end of the year. Because this is on everyone's minds, there are a lot of blogposts recommending which charities you should donate to and match challenges lined up to get people excited. While the end of the year is a fine time to contribute to nonprofits, to me the best time to make donations is today. Today is Tax Day in the United States. It's the deadline that everyone scrambles against to file their taxes and hopefully, if this is you, then by the end of today you've made it [1]!

If you got a refund, putting some of what feels like a windfall to a good cause is just the thing. It's nice not to have to worry about remembering to make donations at the end of the year. And if you wish you'd paid less in taxes, it may benefit you next year to make more charitable contributions./p>

Even if you're outside the U.S. or if you're not in a tax situation where charitable donations make a difference to you the donation will make a huge difference to your favorite nonprofits and their ability to budget, as many of them are in the first quarter of their fiscal year.

[1]As painful as it may have been. I'm glad I'm on the FSF's High Priorities Projects Committee to push for inclusion of tax software. It's really upsetting that there's no free alternative.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

April 3rd last chance to donate towards Compliance Match

by Karen Sandler on April 2, 2015

Tomorrow is the last day to contribute towards Conservancy's $50,000 anonymous match! We've made great progress and are tantalizingly close to making the full goal. We're now 97.8% of the way there. You can help us close the gap — just 11 Supporter sign ups will do it!

If you want more details about the suit that Christoph Hellwig is bringing against VMware in Germany, you can read our FAQ or watch the video below of my keynote at LibrePlanet on the topic.

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, supporter

Supporter Video: Jono Bacon

by Karen Sandler on January 30, 2015

Check out this video of Jono Bacon, Senior Director of Community at the XPrize Foundation and former Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical, talking about Conservancy and why he is a Supporter. "We need to protect the current generation of free and open source projects and also pave the way to a brighter future," explains Jono in the video.

Many thanks to Jono for supporting sofware freedom and our organization! Join Jono and become a supporter of Conservancy today.

Also thanks to Bastian Ilsø for helping us to put this together and to Javier Suarez (jahzzar) for freely licensing his song, "I need", under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), which we used in the video.

If you are at FOSDEM today, sign up as a Supporter and come to our dinner tonight for free. If you aren't yet ready to sign up as an official Supporter, tickets are still available at the door.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter