Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. (also known as "Conservancy") is an organization that provides a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

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 Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the

BusyBox BusyBox is a software suite that provides several List of Unix commands, Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android (operating system), Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the ...

project. In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first executive director, Bradley M. Kuhn 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 as its Executive Director, with Bradley M. Kuhn taking on the role as Distinguished Technologist. In February 2015, the Outreachy 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. The GNO ...

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

QEMU The Quick Emulator (QEMU) is a free and open-source emulator that uses dynamic binary translation to emulate a computer's processor; that is, it translates the emulated binary codes to an equivalent binary format which is executed by the mach ...

, Boost,

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

Inkscape Inkscape is a vector graphics editor. It is used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagrams, and flowcharts. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at ...

Samba Samba () is a broad term for many of the rhythms that compose the better known Brazilian music genres that originated in the Afro-Brazilians, Afro Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th century and early 20th century, It is a name or ...

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

and

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

. 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 form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

. In June 2022, in reaction to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy, Conservancy introduced their "Give Up GitHub" campaign. The campaign urged open source developers to move away from

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

to Codeberg or Sourcehut, or to self-hosted platforms.

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 for violation of his copyrights in its

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

product. The case was taken up by the district court of Hamburg, Germany, where it was dismissed on procedural grounds, and then the same on appeal. Since by that point VMware was about to remove the copyleft material from its product for reasons unrelated to the litigation, Hellwig decided not to appeal further.

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