Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

home and infrastructure support for free and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects.

History

In 2007 Conservancy started coordinating

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the

BusyBox BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with in ...

project. In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first

executive director Executive director is commonly the title of the chief executive officer of a non-profit organization, government agency or international organization. The title is widely used in North American and European not-for-profit organizations, though ...

Bradley M. Kuhn Bradley M. Kuhn (born 1973) is a free software activist from the United States. Kuhn is currently Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence of the Software Freedom Conservancy, having previously been executive director. Until 2010 he was the FLOSS C ...

and a year later, its first

General Counsel A general counsel, also known as chief counsel or chief legal officer (CLO), is the chief in-house lawyer for a company or a governmental department. In a company, the person holding the position typically reports directly to the CEO, and their ...

, Tony Sebro. In May 2012, Conservancy took on GPL compliance and enforcement for several other member projects, as well as for a number of individual Linux kernel developers. In March 2014, Conservancy appointed

Karen Sandler Karen Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Work in Free Software As of March 2014, Sa ...

as its Executive Director, with

taking on the role as Distinguished Technologist. In February 2015, the

Outreachy Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projec ...

program (formerly the Free and Open Source Software Program for Women) announced that it was moving from

The GNOME Project GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no ...

to become part of Conservancy. By July 2015 Conservancy had reached 30 member projects, including

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest ...

, Boost,

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

Inkscape Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Other formats can be imported and exported. Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectang ...

Samba Samba (), also known as samba urbano carioca (''urban Carioca samba'') or simply samba carioca (''Carioca samba''), is a Brazilian music genre that originated in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century. Havin ...

Sugar Labs Sugar Labs is a community-run software project whose mission is to produce, distribute, and support the use of Sugar, an open source desktop environment and learning platform. Sugar Labs was initially established as a member project of the Softwa ...

and

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

. In May 2016,

Yorba Foundation Yorba Foundation was a non-profit software group based in San Francisco, and founded by Adam Dingle wanting to bring first class software to the open source community. This organization had been created to answer people thinking open source brin ...

assigned the copyrights of the projects it developed to Conservancy, including Shotwell, Geary, Valencia, and gexiv2. In November 2017, Conservancy reported that the Software Freedom Law Center had demanded the invalidation of the SFC's

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from others ...

Litigation

In July 2010, Conservancy announced it had prevailed in court against Westinghouse Digital, receiving an injunction as part of a default judgement. In March 2015, Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig against

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

for violation of his copyrights in its

ESXi VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

product. The case will be heard in the district court of Hamburg, Germany. VMware stated that it believed the case was without merit and expressed disappointment that Conservancy had resorted to litigation.

References

External links

* {{FOSS 501(c)(3) organizations Free and open-source software organizations Non-profit organizations based in New York City Organizations established in 2006 Fiscal sponsorship organizations

History

Litigation

See also

References

External links