Software Freedom Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy | @conservancy@social.sfconservancy.org

Software Freedom Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) public charity that acts as a non-profit home for Free, Libre, and Open Source Software projects.

FOSSY is happening again in Portland, OR! Join us August 1-4th 2024 at Portland State University to celebrate and build community around software freedom.

We are so excited to host another conference and hear from *YOU* about what kinds of tracks and programming you want to see this year. Check out our announcement for more information about submitting to run a track.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/mar/28/fossy-2024/

☀️ We were at at the beginning of February! 🤩

Not only we brought there our colourful and lively booth 🎈, but some of our team members hosted talks and discussions 🗨️, and we even co-organized the Legal & Policy Issues devroom with @conservancy 💡

💭 It was very insightful, and all the recordings are publicly available! ⏯️

Check them out ⤵️
https://media.fsfe.org/w/p/1vqJVwpmksnKpLdt77wPXs

@geekygirldawn We're soft launching https://fossy.us for August 1-4th in Portland again! Be on the lookout for more information this week!

@linux_mclinuxface We're tentatively looking at Monday April 8th (as the website now reflects), for track submissions. We're looking forward to what the community wants to see this year, and are still so inspired from last years submissions and great range of topics and talks!

We'll be having office hours over the next couple weeks for folks to pitch ideas and get help, so be on the lookout for those (official) announcements.

@neptune22222 Hopefully it'll be up on SCaLE's Youtube page in a month or so! https://www.youtube.com/@socallinuxexpo or the live stream videos might be watchable as well.

Be sure to catch Tracy's talk: "Running an Open Source Hackerspace" at 17:30 PST to hear about how she uses @inkscape and all other kinds of free software to Make Things!

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x/presentations/running-open-source-hackerspace

Come visit Tracy and Pono at the #SCaLE Exhibition Hall to find out what @conservancy has been up to!

So excited to be back at #SCaLE this year @scale@social.linux.pizza is one of our favorite events, so come visit us at our booth this weekend!

Relatedly, as an effort to help corporate teams better respond to copyleft compliance, we are recommending that companies create a "Copyleft Compliance Incident Response Team" (CCIRT). An area that often falls in between the cracks of engineering, support, and legal teams; a dedicated team responsible for handling the obligations of copyleft compliance will help both end users contact and get the source they are entitled to, and help companies be streamlined in handling licensing and distribution of their copyleft products. You can read more about our suggestions here:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2024/feb/03/ccirt-security-and-software-right-to-repair/

As you may have seen at @fosdem this past weekend, we announced a new community tool for fixing GPL compliance issues: Use The Source. We encourage people to upload, share, and comment on source code candidates for products which run copylefted software so we can find out which products (and companies) give us the required software right to repair, and which ones still need work. Join us and help improve things for everyone!

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/feb/03/use-the-source-launched/

“I don’t want money to compensate for infringement of my license, I want every user to have the freedom that I granted them by publishing software.” — Bradley M. Kuhn @conservancy

Announcing "Use The Source" https://sfconservancy.org/usethesource/

Use The Source is an elegant collaborative platform for users to catalog, find and test source code candidates for real products to verify their reproducibility and reinstallability. Users can discuss whether their device's software is repairable, so they know if the device can be fixed or updated, especially to fix security vulnerabilities or otherwise adapt it to their needs.

"Copyleft licenses are primarily about your rights, as a downstream user who wants to modify/recompile/reinstall your software, not about the “rights” of copyright holder.

You are a third-party beneficiary of the licensing terms."

"Copyleft is quixotic, copyleft is rebellion."

"The history of copyleft as an activist strategy can only be understood through the lens of 20 years of cooption of FOSS into mainstream tech."

Ready for our Policy Fellow and Hacker in Residence Bradley M. Kuhn's main track talk titled "Copyleft and the GPL: Finding the Path Forward to Defend our Software Right to Repair"!

Happy first day of #FOSDEM! You can come see us in K building level 2. And don't miss the @outreachy keynote starting in 15 minutes on the main track!

With your help we achieved our record $161,729 match fund in time! 🥳 🎉 That's $325,400 to support the work we do to for software rights and digital freedom. Thank you all!

Only $358 left... so close to the finish line. *YOU* could be the one to tip us over the line and make our match 🥳 Thank you all so much for making our work possible, we couldn't do it without you!!

https://sfconservancy.org/donate/

#SFCdrive

Less than $5,000 to go, we're so close to completing our match. Just a few hours left to get your donation doubled 🤩 to support software freedom. Any amount helps, so if it's within your means, please consider donating today!

https://sfconservancy.org/donate/

The scale of what @conservancy is able to accomplish given it's resources is truly impressive. I personally really appreciate the support they provide to their member projects. I bet most people on fedi would recognize at least a few names: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/

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