Software Freedom Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while Conservancy takes care of the projects' needs that do not relate directly to software development and documentation.

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An Overview of Conservancy… Conservancy's current member projects… Services Conservancy provides to its member projects… Conservancy's unique work defending and upholding copyleft licenses (e.g., the GPL) … Conservancy's Non-Profit Accounting Project …

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Recent News

November 3, 2016

Conservancy Promotes Transparency by Publishing Template Agreements for Linux Compliance Program

Today at the Linux Plumbers Conference, Software Freedom Conservancy hosts its second feedback session on the GPL Compliance Program for Linux Developers. These sessions, which Conservancy is hosting at relevant events over the next year and summarizing for public review, will seek input and ideas from the Linux community about GPL enforcement, answer questions, and plan strategies to deal with GPL enforcement actions that do not follow Conservancy and FSF's Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement.

The publication of the template agreements ([1], [2]) demonstrates Conservancy's commitment to transparency. The documents have a similar structure as Conservancy's agreements with its member projects, designed to work at the service of the coalition. They include an easy termination provision, requiring just thirty days' notice at any time. Because the aim of Conservancy's compliance work is to avoid litigation, no lawsuits may be initiated without further explicit agreement.

Karen Sandler Delivered Keynote at OSCON EU, Taught Kids in London about Free Software

Conservancy's Executive Director Karen Sandler delivered a keynote last week in London, England at OSCON EU. Karen discussed software freedom ideology and its place relative to social justice issues. Drawing from her experiences looking at medical devices, Karen illustrated software freedom as a threshold issue, at the service of those bigger challenges. Karen stated the case for why software must be free and open in order to solve our biggest social problems effectively in the long term.

Conservancy Blog

Conservancy's First GPL Enforcement Feedback Session

Posted by Bradley M. Kuhn on October 27, 2016

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk at the OpenWrt Summit. But, I also had the opportunity to host the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the Linux developer community about Conservancy's GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers. This blog post has, in addition to a recording of my talk, also includes a written summary of that GPL compliance feedback session at ELC EU!

See you at OSCON EU!

Posted by Karen Sandler on October 14, 2016

Karen talks about this upcoming week at OSCON EU, where she is giving a session talk about worldwide enforcement efforts, a keynote entitled "Is Software Freedom a Social Justice Issue?" and, with kind volunteers, will be staffing a booth on the expo floor. If you are attending OSCON EU, come say hello!