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 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 to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

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 inte ...

project. In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first executive director,

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 ...

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

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. It is n ...

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

, Git, Inkscape,

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. Havi ...

, Sugar Labs and

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented grapes. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different ...

. 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 ot ...

Litigation

In July 2010, Conservancy announced it had prevailed in court against

Westinghouse Digital Westinghouse Electronics LLC is a Chinese-owned American company that manufactures LCD televisions located in Diamond Bar, California. It is a licensee of the way Westinghouse Licensing Corporation, commonly known as Westinghouse Electric Corporat ...

, 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