Software Freedom Conservancy

Last updated

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.
FoundedApril 7, 2006;18 years ago (2006-04-07)
Type 501(c)(3)
Location
FieldsSoftware
Key people
 Karen Sandler (executive director)
Bradley M. Kuhn ("Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence")
Revenue (2020)
$2,970,607 [1]
Website sfconservancy.org

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. (also known as "Conservancy") is an organization that provides a non-profit home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects. [2]

Contents

History

In 2007, Conservancy started coordinating GNU General Public License compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the BusyBox project. [3]

In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first executive director, Bradley M. Kuhn [4] and a year later, its first General Counsel, Tony Sebro. [5] 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. [6] [7] In March 2014, Conservancy appointed Karen Sandler as its Executive Director, with Bradley M. Kuhn taking on the role as Distinguished Technologist. [8] [9]

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. [10]

By July 2015, Conservancy had reached 30 member projects, including QEMU, Boost, BusyBox, Git, Inkscape, Samba, Sugar Labs and Wine. [11]

In May 2016, Yorba Foundation assigned the copyrights of the projects it developed to Conservancy, including Shotwell, Geary, Valencia, and gexiv2. [12]

In November 2017, Conservancy reported that the Software Freedom Law Center had demanded the invalidation of the SFC's trademark. [13] [ non-primary source needed ]

In June 2022, in reaction to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy, Conservancy introduced their "Give Up GitHub" campaign. [14] [15] The campaign urged open source developers to move away from GitHub to Codeberg or Sourcehut, or to self-hosted platforms. [14]

Litigation

In July 2010, Conservancy announced it had prevailed in court against Westinghouse Digital, receiving an injunction as part of a default judgement. [16]

In March 2015, Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for violation of his copyrights in its ESXi product. [17] [18] 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, [19] Hellwig decided not to appeal further. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FSF Free Software Awards</span>

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software and since 2005, also the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BusyBox</span> Collection of Unix tools

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 interfaces provided by the Linux kernel. It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux", as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, after controversially deciding not to move to version 3.

The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. In 2005 the Open Source Initiative approved the license. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers it a free software license, but one which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software Freedom Law Center</span> Pro bono legal organization for developers

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is an organization that provides pro bono legal representation and related services to not-for-profit developers of free software/open source software. It was launched in February 2005 with Eben Moglen as chairman. Initial funding of US$4 million was pledged by Open Source Development Labs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bradley M. Kuhn</span> American free software activist

Bradley M. Kuhn is a free software activist from the United States.

Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License, but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WTFPL</span> Permissive free software license

The WTFPL is a permissive free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The name is an abbreviation of Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VMware ESXi</span> Enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor for deploying and serving virtual computers

VMware ESXi 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 an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.

License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem negatively by the burden of increasingly complex license selection, license interaction, and license compatibility considerations.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-software license</span> License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The GPL was the first copyleft license for general use. It was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shotwell (software)</span> Free software image organizer

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Sandler</span> American lawyer in free software

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. She holds an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven.

The O'Reilly Open Source Award is presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source. From 2005 to 2009 the award was known as the Google–O'Reilly Open Source Award but since 2010 the awards have only carried the O'Reilly name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geary (e-mail client)</span> Open-source email client

Geary is a free and open-source email client written in Vala and based on WebKitGTK. Although since adopted by the GNOME project, it originally was developed by the Yorba Foundation. The purpose of this e-mail client, according to Adam Dingle, Yorba founder, was to bring back users from online webmails to a faster and easier to use desktop application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yorba Foundation</span> Non-profit organization

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 brings hard to use, clunky and low-quality software usable only by hackers.

Open source license litigation involves lawsuits surrounding open-source licensed software. Many of the legal rights of open source software licensors enforceable against users violating licensing agreements are untested by the U.S. legal system. Free and open source software (FOSS) is distributed under a variety of free-software licenses, which are unique among other software licenses. Legal action against open source licenses involves questions about their validity and enforceability.

References

  1. ↑ Roberts, Ken Schwencke, Mike Tigas, Sisi Wei, Alec Glassford, Andrea Suozzo, Brandon (May 9, 2013). "Software Freedom Conservancy Inc - Nonprofit Explorer". ProPublica. Retrieved September 13, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ↑ "Current Projects". Software Freedom Conservancy. Retrieved November 12, 2022.
  3. ↑ Phipps, Simon (June 1, 2012). "Why the GPL licensing cops are the good guys". Infoworld. Retrieved June 3, 2012.
  4. ↑ "Software Freedom Conservancy Appoints Full-Time Executive Director". October 4, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Tony Sebro Joins Conservancy as General Counsel". September 30, 2011. Retrieved October 7, 2011.
  6. ↑ Brian Proffitt (May 29, 2012). "Linux kernel devs, Samba join GPL compliance effort". IT World. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
  7. ↑ "Conservancy Projects Launch Coordinated Free Software Compliance Efforts". Software Freedom Conservancy. May 29, 2012. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Karen Sandler joins Conservancy's Management Team". March 31, 2014. Retrieved April 17, 2014.
  9. ↑ Bhati, Monika (April 1, 2014). "Karen Sandler resigns as GNOME Foundation's executive director". Muktware. Archived from the original on April 18, 2014. Retrieved April 17, 2014.
  10. ↑ "Outreach Program to Join Conservancy from GNOME; Program Renames to Outreachy". Software Freedom Conservancy. February 4, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2015.
  11. ↑ "Current Member Projects - Software Freedom Conservancy" . Retrieved February 2, 2015.
  12. ↑ "Yorba Assigns Shotwell and Geary Copyrights to Software Freedom Conservancy". May 10, 2016. Retrieved November 17, 2015.
  13. ↑ "SFLC Files Bizarre Legal Action Against Its Former Client". Software Freedom Conservancy. Retrieved November 4, 2017.
  14. 1 2 "Give Up Github!". Software Freedom Conservancy. June 29, 2022. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  15. ↑ Claburn, Thomas (June 30, 2022). "Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same". The Register . Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  16. ↑ "Conservancy Receives Default Judgment For BusyBox GPL Enforcement". Software Freedom Conservancy. Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Conservancy Announces Funding for GPL Compliance Lawsuit". Software Freedom Conservancy. Retrieved March 7, 2015.
  18. ↑ Phipps, Simon (March 5, 2015). "VMware heads to court over GPL violations". InfoWorld. Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  19. ↑ "VMware's Update to Mr. Hellwig's Legal Proceedings". VMware. March 4, 2019. Archived from the original on November 3, 2023. Retrieved January 19, 2024.
  20. ↑ "VMware Suit Concludes in Germany". Software Freedom Conservancy. Retrieved January 19, 2024.
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