Software Freedom Conservancy Launches 2015 Fundraiser
Seeks 2500 Supporters to Continue Enforcement
November 23, 2015
Today Software Freedom Conservancy announces a major fundraising effort. Pointing to the difficulty of relying on corporate funding while pursuing important but controversial issues, like GPL compliance, Conservancy has structured its fundraiser to increase individual support. The organization needs at least 750 annual Supporters to continue its basic community services and 2500 to avoid hibernating its enforcement efforts. If Conservancy does not meet its goals, it will be forced to radically restructure and wind down a substantial portion of its operations.
Conservancy highlights its major successes this year:
- Conservancy brought four new projects under the protection of the
Conservancy: QEMU,
the generic machine emulator and
virtualizer, The Bro Network Security
Monitor, the Godot Game Engine,
and Outreachy, a program dedicated to
helping people from underrepresented groups get involved in free and open
source software. Conservancy also worked with the Debian community to launch
the Debian
Copyright Aggregation Project at their request.
- Conservancy supported
the lawsuit Christoph Hellwig has brought against VMware in Germany, the
first case on derivative works and the GPL.
- Conservancy fought for
and successfully
earned an exemption from the Library of Congress in the DMCA review
process to legally permit circumvention of encryption on Smart TVs,
ensuring that you are free to hack on the devices that you legally own.
- Conservancy collaborated with the Free Software
Foundation to publish
the Principles
of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement, establishing community norms for
enforcing the GPL in the public's interest, which have
already been translated
into Korean.
- Along with FSF, Conservancy
helped Canonical,
Ltd. achieve compliance in its "Intellectual Property" Policy, while
pointing out that the policy fails to address important software freedom
issues.
- Conservancy conducted friendly discussions with companies out of compliance with
the GPL, seeking non-litigious resolutions.
- Conservancy participated in the process
of telling
the FCC to fix its proposed rules restricting third-party modification of
firmware in wireless devices.
- Conservancy made 172 contractor payments to developers writing free and open source
software, which included various different internships and contract
software development work.
- Conservancy helped, coordinated, and financially insured volunteers of three of
our member projects to organize large annual conferences, where thousands of
attendees learned about free and open source software.
- Conservancy processed and paid 116 reimbursement requests to individuals doing work
around the globe advocating for their free and open source software
projects at conferences and other venues.
- Conservancy gave keynotes
at DebConf, FOSDEM, FISL, LibrePlanet, Linaro
Connect, and participated in many more conferences all over the world; Conservancy also
shared its expertise in initiatives
like copyleft.org. We participated in
interviews and blogposts, and
Bradley and Karen published episodes of Free as in
Freedom, dedicated to discussing the important issues in software
freedom.
Donate to Conservancy now.
