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Displaying posts by Karen Sandler

See you at LibrePlanet!

by Karen Sandler on March 18, 2016

I'm getting ready to head up to Massachusetts for LibrePlanet, one of my favorite conferences! This year will be a bit different, as Conservancy is having our very first booth there. I'm particularly excited about the amazing volunteers who have agreed to staff the booth. We started an email thread to coordinate schedules about who should be in the booth when, and got talking about what message we wanted to convey through the booth.

In a quick summary of talking points, I mentioned that I thought LibrePlanet attendees would be most interested in GPL enforcement and Outreachy. Ira Cooper, Samba Team Member and one of the volunteers wrote back:

Do you think we'll have anyone asking about what benefits the projects recieve? To be honest, as a member of the conservancy, to some degree, the boring things matter most. Without someone to help with handling our finances etc... It'd be chaos.

The fact that there is a structure where multiple projects can share that work, is actually at least as powerful in some ways.

Yes, the GPL and what not, is the flashy stuff. But... It is important to tell people about the things that allow these projects to live and breathe. :)

Soon after, Yamil Suarez, another volunteer with the Evergreen project chimed in:

Also, I wanted to add that to my project (Evergreen), it really matters to have the SFC keeps us in compliance with the IRS. Even though we have a our own board there is always turnaround, the SFC gives us continuation in our regulatory compliance. Which I think is invaluable. Also, when hosting conferences, there are plenty of regulatory minefields involved that the SFC keeps an eye on.

I was truly floored by how clear and eloquent Ira and Yamil were about the usefulness of Conservancy as a fiscal sponsor. I often find it hard to quickly explain that part of the Conservancy's work. Glossing over "the boring stuff" just doesn't explain the challenges we try to address or why we're so valuable to our Member Projects. I'm really looking forward to spending time with all of our volunteers in the booth this weekend. If you're at LibrePlanet, stop by and say hello.

Plus if you can and haven't done so already, please consider signing up as a Conservancy Supporter, and you'll be invited to a cocktail hour celebrating 10 years of Conservancy!. If you are already a Supporter, don't forget to RSVP by tomorrow. Bradley and I will both be there (and at LibrePlanet, generally), excited to talk about software freedom with you. I also have the honor of delivering the closing keynote and will participate in a panel about the high priorities project list. See you there!

Tags: conservancy

Bart Massey on Why You Should Be a Conservancy Supporter

by Karen Sandler on January 28, 2016

In this video, Bart Massey talks about why he is a passionate supporter of Conservancy. Bart discusses why he thinks Conservancy is relevant for the next 20 years of software freedom, tells you about his favorite Conservancy project and strongly encourages you to become a Conservancy Supporter.

(Also available on YouTube.)

Tags: conservancy, supporter

I'm Running for the Linux Foundation Board of Directors

by Karen Sandler on January 17, 2016

[This blog post received some press coverage. It's now unclear whether Linux community members can run for the Linux Foundation board. I will update here if I learn more. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' article has a good overview of the situation. ]

As we begin a new year, I'm super excited that Conservancy has almost reached our initial target of 750 Supporters (we're just 4 Supporters away from this goal! If you haven't signed up, you can push us past this first milestone!). We launched our Supporter program over a year ago and more recently, in November, we asked you all to become Supporters now so that Conservancy can survive. Conservancy is moving toward a funding model primarily from individuals rather than larger corporate sponsors. While we are about to reach our minimal target, we still have a long way to go to our final goal of 2,500 Supporters — which will allow us to continue all of Conservancy's critical programs, including copyleft enforcement. Many individuals have come forward to donate, and we hope that many more of you do so too! I was really excited about the statement of support published last week by the GNOME Foundation, and in particular their point that enforcement is necessary and benefits GNOME and free software as a whole.

Of course, we're still excited about our for-profit sponsors, and list them at the top of our sponsors page. We'd like to draw particular attention to Private Internet Access, which gave a generous match so that individuals who join this month will double their donations via the match. We have only two weeks left to take advantage of this, so if you are considering donating, please do it soon!

Conservancy is focusing on individual giving via our Supporter campaign because our organization has a very special and unique status, called 501(c)(3) charity status here in the US. That means that Conservancy's constituency is the general public. We do the jobs in the software freedom community that maximize the rights of the general public in the use and development of their software.

We're glad that so many support us in doing those jobs for public good. But Conservancy doesn't imagine that we can do all the jobs in our community. In fact, there's a definite need for companies to have an organization that specifically represents their interests in the software freedom community. In my view, the organization that does the job best is the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) trade association, so they advocate ultimately for the common business interest of their members. I've been impressed at Linux Foundation's growth and their increasing ability to market Linux and related free software technologies to new companies; no organization does more to encourage companies to adopt Linux than Linux Foundation.

While trade associations like Linux Foundation usually represent only companies, Linux Foundation seeks to do even more. I've talked a lot, including just a few days ago, with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. He often points out how, while there is no public-good mandate for trade associations, nothing stops trade associations from doing work in the public good, since that often does align with the needs of their corporate members. In particular, Linux Foundation did something great to deliver on that idea — unlike most other trade associations, Linux Foundation by laws allow for two Board Seats elected by individuals.1 This gives individuals a minority voice on their Board of Directors, so that companies that control Linux Foundation's board has a direct path to hear for the community.

I signed up last year as an Individual Affiliate of Linux Foundation and nominated myself as a candidate for Linux Foundation's Board of Directors. At my Linaro Connect keynote in late September, I publicly announced my candidacy for the 2016 Linux Foundation Board of Directors. If elected, I look forward to the opportunity to give feedback and help directly with Jim's commitment to help Linux Foundation do good things not just for its corporate members, but for all individuals, too. While Linux Foundation has not yet announced when this years' elections will occur, I hope all Individual LF Affiliates will watch for the election and vote for me. I'll of course update the community here on when I know more about the details.

While the focus of my work is at Conservancy, I really believe that all of us should give time to other organizations in the community to make all of them better. Conservancy announced in the last two years multiple collaborations (such as our GPL enforcement principles and copyleft.org) with the Free Software Foundation, and I have long provided pro-bono legal counsel to both the FSF, GNOME Foundation and Question Copyright, in addition to my job at Conservancy. I also try to contribute whenever I can to the GNOME engagement team. While I do believe prioritizing volunteer work for charities is ideal, I also see an opportunity here, as I said in my Linaro keynote, to help companies understand the needs and mindset of community and non-commercial developers who also collaborate on key software freedom projects. I hope that platform will find resonance with Linux Foundation's Individual Affiliates, and I ask for their votes.


1 This link on Linux Foundation's website broke a few days after I posted this blog post. The link in the main post is to the Google Cached version for now.

Tags: conservancy, GPL, supporter

From a lawyer who hates litigation

by Karen Sandler on December 30, 2015

Before I started working in free and open source software, before I found out I had a heart condition and became passionate about software freedom, I was a corporate lawyer at a law firm. I worked on various financial transactions. There were ups and downs to this kind of work but throughout I was always extremely vocal about how happy I was that I didn't do any litigation.

Litigation is expensive and it is exhausting. As a lawyer you're dealing with unhappy people who can't resolve their problems in a professional manner, whose relationships, however rosy they may have been, have completely broken down. When I started working in free and open source software, I started out primarily as a nonprofits lawyer. As I did more in copyright and trademark, I continued to avoid GPL litigation. I wasn't really convinced that it was needed and I was sure I wanted no part of the actual work. I also was pretty license agnostic. X.Org, Apache Foundation and other permissively licensed projects were my clients and their passion for free software was very inspiring. I did think that the legal mechanisms in copyleft were fascinating.

Like Keith Packard, my view has changed considerably over the years. I became frustrated seeing companies wrest control of permissively licensed projects, or more often, engineer that from the outset. I've seen developers convinced that the only way a new project will gain adoption is through a lax permissive license only to find down the road that so much of their code had been proprietarized. I think there are times that a permissive license may be the right choice, but I'm now thoroughly convinced about the benefits of copyleft. Seeing the exceptional collaboration in the Linux kernel, for example, has sold me.

But as Bradley put it in our oggcast, “ The GPL is not magic pixie dust.” Just choosing a license is not enough. As you surely have too, I've seen companies abuse rights granted to them under the GPL over and over again. As the years pass, it seems that more and more of them want to walk as close to the edge of infringement as they can, and some flagrantly adopt a catch-me-if-you-can attitude.

As a confrontation-averse person who has always hated litigation, I was certain that I would be able to help with the situation and convince companies to do the right thing. I really thought that some plucky upbeat bridge building would make the difference and that I was just the woman to do it. But what I found is that these attempts are futile if there are no consequences to violating the license. You can talk about compliance until you are blue in the face, run webinars, publish educational materials, form working groups and discussion lists but you cannot take the first step of asking for compliance if at some point someone isn't willing to take that last step of a lawsuit. We at Conservancy are committed to doing this in the ways that are best for long-term free software adoption. This is hard work. And because it's adversarial, no matter how nicely we try to do it, no matter how much time we give to companies to come into compliance and no matter how much help we try to give, we can't count on corporate donors to support it (though many of the individuals working at those companies privately tell me they support it and that it helps them be able to establish budgets around compliance internally).

Conservancy is a public charity, not a for profit company or trade association. We serve the public's interest. I am deeply convinced that GPL enforcement is necessary and good for the free software ecosystem. Bradley is too. So are the members of our Copyleft Compliance Projects. But that's simply not enough. It's not enough from a financial perspective and it's not enough from an ideological one either. What matters is what the public thinks. What matters is what you think. This fundraiser is not a ploy to raise more money with an empty threat. If we can't establish support for enforcement then we just shouldn't be doing it.

Despite the fact that I am an employee of the organization, I am myself signing up as a Conservancy Supporter (in addition to my FSF associate membership). I hope you will join me now too. GPL enforcement is too important to hibernate.

Tags: conservancy, GPL, supporter

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