Become a Sustainer Now

2025 was a busy and productive year here at Software Freedom Conservancy, from continuing the Vizio law suit to running the 3rd annual FOSSY, to continuing Outreachy's exceptional internship program, and helping with the production of the OpenWrt One. Software freedom is continuing to expand its reach and image in the public eye. This has been a tumultuous year for all non-profits and activist organizations; we're so proud to continue our operations and work for all of our digital futures.

Outreachy: Outreachy continues to lead the way in providing opportunities to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by under representation in technology. Despite the decrease in funding for diversity programs worldwide, we continued to provide great internships for 51 people! We've continued to provide these critical opportunities to people who need them most.

Among our many avenues for making change, SFC works with our projects to do everything that they need to achieve their publicly minded goals, whether it be through conferences, manufacturing hardware or providing important hosting and infrastructure services to the free software world. Our member projects provide ways to assert our freedom with our technology and pursue important work in expanding the ways that we make free software available for everyone. Through important accessibility libraries, open source radio technology, creating freedom respecting content hosting software, and leading development in supply chain security, SFC member projects represent the wide swath of the free software ecosystem at large.

Pono giving OSUOSL director Lance Albertson the Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom

copyright John Sullivan, CC-BY 3.0

This year we hosted the third annual FOSSY in Portland, Oregon. You can watch the many excellent talks here. We awarded the first annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom to Lance Albertson from the OSUOSL. Next year we will be hosting the event at the University of British Columbia August 6th – 9th 2026. You can sign up to our mailing list to stay informed or join our XMPP room.

All year long, we've worked tirelessly on our monumental and ground-breaking Software Right to Repair litigation, which we expect to recognize a third-party right to enforce copyleft licenses (such as the GPL and LGPL). During our fundraiser this year, we'll be discussing various aspects of the litigation against Vizio — so those of you who are litigation geeks should be sure to tune into our live Q&As!

As software based technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, it's vital that we communicate the importance of software freedom to the wider population. We have a video(narrated by our Executive Director Karen Sandler) that introduces the ideas of software freedom, and specifically what Software Freedom Conservancy does. Continuing to advocate against corporate controlled software, we'd also like to remind you that as a Sustainer or FOSS contributor, we will provide you with your own BigBlueButton account so that you can host your own video calls on a FOSS platform. Once you have donated to us, you can fill our the new account signup and your account will be approved. We also provide a publicly facing Etherpad instance, using our own member project software to show that it's easy for everyone to collaborate using free software tools.

This year our staff attended and spoke at many conferences, including keynoting at SCaLE, where Director of Compliance Denver Gingerich gave some background on the OpenWrt One, Policy Fellow and Hacker in Residence Bradley M. Kuhn keynoted the GNU Radio Conference, and Executive Director Karen Sandler keynoted at PostgreSQL EU, on the FOSDEM mainstage with Denver, and SFSCon "The Heart of Our Software", and was subsequently featured on television! (segment, in German, begins at 3:56).

Karen delivering a keynote in front of SFSCon crowd - CC-BY-SA 4.0 Matthias Kirschner

SFC staff co-organized the Legal and Policy DevRoom at FOSDEM, speaking to both current issues by hosting a panel discussion at FOSDEM, spoke about the "LGPL enforced in Germany: how we helped a purchaser use the courts to compel compliance", and Karen spoke in the funding room about When is it Right to Say No to Funding?. We were also at SambaXP, LLW, WineConf, participated in the UN Open Source Week 2025, and even taught a seminar at Creighton University informing the students about licensing and the software right to repair, you can view the slides here.

SFC's advocacy for software freedom and digital rights is widening and spreading to more regional policy; Denver, our Director of Compliance, joined the Canadian Repair Convention where he is Vice President of the CanRepair Project Management Committee, and his work introduced a focus on software for the CanRepair principles. On the US policy side, we joined a petition to defend the right to cellphone unlocking against Verizon's attempted waiver. We helped work on the FULU repair bounties, and with Consumer Reports to have the "software right to repair" included in their whitepaper titled Longevity by Design: How to Build Long-lived Connected Products. We also participated to make sure that software right to repair was included in the open letter and coalition requesting the Android ecosystem remain open.

Coalition building and community hosting is something we take so much pride in, and by hosting FOSSY our own community focused conference. Hosting tracks, keynotes and giving talks, our staff was so excited to be back in Portland to celebrate software freedom with our attendees.

Here are some highlights from the incredible member projects (members as our relationship is a collaborative partnership). Ranging from education software, to content management systems, copyright aggregation, free firmware and open compatibility software, SFC is home to an amazing gamut of incredibly important infrastructural and user facing free software projects.

The Institute for Computing in Research completed it's seventh year, providing training, education and real world software experience to 27 high school students in 3 cities. These research internships are a great and unique way for high school students to get involved in real academic research while also being exposed to the ideas and principles of software freedom.

Picture of OpenWrt One PCB showing Software Freedom Conservancy logo and offer for source CC-BY-SA 4.0 Denver Gingerich

OpenWrt with support from SFC, manufactured their first official hardware project called the OpenWrt One! Being both reference hardware for the project as well as a shining example of providing making the Complete Corresponding Source available. We're so excited for the OpenWrt team for making this happen and increasing the amount of open source first products in the world.

QEMU hosted KVM Forum in Milan this year. The conference featured talks from over 50 speakers, which you can view on the conference website. qemu remains a hallmark project that is the industry standard for emulation and virtualization, on which so much of our technology relies.

Git participated in GSoC with three students and Outreachy with two students. The Git Merge conference in San Francisco this fall celebrated their 20th year. The project stands as a standard for free software development and just as importantly, using free software to develop itself.

Inkscape continued their incredible sustained development and participated in many international events, such as India FOSS in Bengaluru, the Libre Graphics Meeting in Nuremberg, following their own Summit. An inspiring project showcasing a community driven ethos.

Sourceware celebrated their second year as a member project. The project continues to power much of the backbone infrastructure for the creation of FOSS. There was a big presence at the famous GNU Tools Cauldron in Porto. Setup the Sourceware Forge (an experiment with Forgejo). And together with Conservancy staff, the PLC wrote a Cyber Security FAQ to explain the US Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity Executive Order 14028 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act (EU CRA).

Reproducible Builds continued their incredible work with The Sovereign Tech Fund to lead by example the practicality and importance of supply chain security. Giving talks in over 4 countries, bringing in new contractors, and hosting their annual summit, it's been an incredibly busy year for the team!