Software Freedom Conservancy


Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support, including legal services, for free/open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, with the help of the Software Freedom Law Center. As of June 2018, the organization had over 40 member projects.

History

Software Freedom Conservancy was established in 2006, with the backing of the Software Freedom Law Center.
In 2007 Conservancy started coordinating GNU General Public License compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the BusyBox project .
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, 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 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.
In May 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.
In November 2017, the SFC reported that the Software Freedom Law Center had demanded the invalidation of the SFC's trademark.

Member projects

Current projects

the following 46 projects are members of Software Freedom Conservancy:
These projects have since been removed from the Software Freedom Conservancy's current project list since 2016:
, Conservancy's directors are:
The Board Secretary is Karen Sandler.
Past directors include:
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.