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Conservancy BlogDisplaying posts
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by on September 3, 2025
You may have heard that Google will be limiting sideloading in the next few months, which is likely to be enforced through Google Play Services, something that runs on virtually all Android phones. Google plans include blocking sideloading of apps where the developer has not shown their ID to Google. Many people have been asking us how they can support app developers who will not or cannot be involved in a Google-run identity verification program.
In particular, we've been increasingly hearing that Android users want to remove their dependence on Google, for this and many other reasons, including the tracking and surveillance that come with using Google Play Services and other Google apps. As a result, we will be hosting a Q&A session this week, in conjunction with folks from F-Droid, to discuss how to best remove proprietary Google code from your phone, and ensure that you control how your phone operates, and which apps can run on it (and from whom).
We will cover the basics of which Google apps and other code you might be using, which of that you can remove while maintaining the use cases you have for your phone, and how to adapt use cases to potentially further reduce reliance on other non-free tools that prevent you from using your phone as you wish.
Among other options, we'll talk about how to use LineageOS on your phone, or another phone you might have already, what you can expect from alternate OSes in general, and how you can keep doing what you need, while giving yourself more control over what you can do in the future. Alongside participants from F-Droid, we will also discuss the F-Droid project, which hosts free apps that provide alternatives for non-free apps from Google Play, as well as classifying apps by how your data is handled, so you can maintain as much say over your privacy and freedom as possible.
We're excited to chat about how to improve your phone experience through the tools and expertise that software right to repair enthusiasts have created to ensure your phone and what you do on it is truly in your own hands!
by on July 19, 2023
This past weekend, July 13-16th, 2023, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) hosted and ran a new conference, FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was glad to host the keynote panel discussion on the recent change made by Red Hat (now a subsidiary of IBM) regarding the public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
The panelists included (in alphabetical order) Jeremy Alison, software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux) and Samba co-founder, myself, Bradley M. Kuhn, policy fellow at SFC, benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and James (Jim) Wright, who is Oracle’s Chief Architect for Open Source Policy, Strategy, Compliance, and Alliances.
Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel, but we were able to gather the key organizations impacted by Red Hat's recent decision to cease public distribution of RHEL sources. SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel.
We're very glad to make the video available to everyone who has been following this evolving story. FOSSY is a new event, and we've hopefully shown how running a community-led FOSS event here in Portland each summer creates an environment where these kinds of important discussions can be held to explore issues impacting FOSS users around the world.
I thank our panelists again for booking last-minute travel to be with us for this exciting panel and thank all the FOSSY attendees for their excellent questions during the panel.
I hope to see all of you at next years' FOSSY!
by on July 17, 2020
This year's GUADEC — the GNOME community's annual conference — will be virtual. Two Conservancy staffers are participating and the conference will be run using the free (as in freedom) Big Blue Button platform. We're especially looking forward to being part of an event that doesn't encourage attendees to engage with proprietary software.
Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler is co-presenting with Molly de Blanc on "Introducing Principles of Digital Autonomy", they'll be sharing an activist's perspective on how we interact with technology on a daily basis and how the technology using public could re-imagine that relationship in a way that better respects user autonomy and privacy. The talk will stream on July 22nd, at 18:45 UTC.
Our Director of Community Operations, Deb Nicholson will present two topics at GUADEC this year. On July 23rd, at 17:15 UTC, she will share her communication strategies in "Let's Have Great Meetings!" Then on Saturday, she will present "Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism" on July 25th at 18:45, a look at alternative tactics for creating software that doesn't exploit its users.
This year's event is free (as in cost) to attend and conveniently located online. Registration is open now -- see you next week!
by on April 27, 2020
We've got a handful of videos from free software events that took place earlier this year and then two upcoming online appearances with different communities.
Bradley and Karen both attended linux.conf.au, a fantastic, long-running community conference that was held at Australia's Gold Coast in January. Bradley Kuhn, our Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence gave a tutorial on the GNU General Public License, version 2 aimed at helping folks participate knowledgeably in both internal and external licensing conversations, "Introduction to Linux's License." Karen Sandler, our Executive Director co-presented with Bradley on the challenges of being a FOSS Activist, "Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn't Yet: A Guide & Commiseration Session for FOSS Activists."
On the day before FOSDEM, Deb Nicholson, our Director of Community Outreach keynoted CHAOSSCon in Brussels. Her presentation, "Ethics: What You Know & What You Don't Know" is about biases, pre-conceptions and how to work though them when you're building and optimizing free software communities.
SCaLE (aka the Southern California Linux Expo), a large FOSS community conference, was held in early March. Vagrant Cascadian is one of the lead developers working on Reproducible Builds and he gave a talk titled, "There and Back Again, Reproducibly!" Reproducible Builds is a Conservancy member project that works on a process to create an independently verifiable path from source code to the binary code. Want to learn how it works and why you might want it for your free software project? Then you should definitely check out this talk.
GNOME is hosting a social hour on the first Friday of every month at 16:00 UTC. The special guest on May 8th will be Deb Nicholson, our Director of Community Outreach. She'll be talking about "Roadmapping and Finding People" which is a talk about planning and delegating for community-driven free software projects.
Deb is also giving a remote talk at Open Source 101 on May 12th, titled Software Licensing and Compliance: It’s All About Community." Tune in at 4:00 PM EDT (20:00 UTC) to catch it live.