Harman Patil (Editor)

Software Freedom Conservancy

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Fields
  
Software

Founder
  
Bradley M. Kuhn

Headquarters
  
New York, United States

Website
  
sfconservancy.org

Founded
  
7 April 2006

Type of business
  
501(c)(3)

Software Freedom Conservancy httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsthu

Location
  
New York, New York, United States

Key people
  
Karen Sandler (executive director) Bradley M. Kuhn (president)

Similar
  
GNOME Foundation, The Document Foundation, XiphOrg Foundation, FreeBSD Foundation, Open Source Initiative

Profiles

The risks of free software with software freedom conservancy s bradley kuhn


The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for free/open source software projects, established in 2006.

Contents

Karen sandler software freedom conservancy


History

Conservancy was established in 2006.

In 2007 Conservancy started coordinated GPL compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the BusyBox project, see BusyBox GPL lawsuits. Later, the BusyBox maintainer Rob Landley who initially supported these lawsuits, regretted his decision and criticized the suing practice of the SFC.

In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first Executive Director, Bradley M. Kuhn and a year later, its first General Counsel, Tony Sebro. In May 2012, Conservancy took on GPL compliance and enforcement for several other member projects, and 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 to become part of Conservancy.

As of July 2015, Conservancy had 30 member projects, including QEMU, Boost, BusyBox, Git, Inkscape, Samba, Sugar Labs and Wine.

On May 10, 2016, Yorba Foundation assigned the copyrights of the projects it has developed to Software Freedom Conservancy. This includes copyrights for Shotwell, Geary, Valencia, gexiv2. California is absent of the bundle because of an oversight on Yorba's part.

Member projects

As of June 2016 the following 43 projects are members of the Software Freedom Conservancy:

Directors

As of January 2016, Conservancy's directors are:

The Board Secretary is Karen Sandler.

Past directors include:

  • Peter T. Brown (Treasurer)
  • 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 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

    Software Freedom Conservancy Wikipedia