Software Freedom Conservancy

FOSSY CFP and ticket sales are now open! Be sure to submit your talk to one of our many incredible tracks before June 14th!

Join us at 19:00 UTC in our XMPP/ IRC room for office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays if you have any questions. Or you can email conference@sfconservancy.org

You can find more information here as well: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/may/23/fossy-2024-cfp-announcement/

@karen was just on an episode of @GoodRobotAndys talking about why control over our devices is so important, and how software freedom affects everyone. Be sure to check out the episode!

https://www.artificialworlds.net/goodrobotandys/2024/04/23/s11e08-karen-sandler-on-taking-back-control-through-software-freedom-the-good-robot-andys/

Our Director of Compliance is testifying tomorrow about Software Right to Repair for the DMCA in front of the Copyright Office. Supporting other Right to Repair organizations, and talking about the needs for copyleft and support of repairing our software.

If you want to tune in at 2:30 PM ET you can find more information here under the "Register to Watch Public Hearings": https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/ (warning, required use of proprietary software to view the hearing).

@philip Yes! We'll be publishing more information on how to volunteer soon :)

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/

@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/

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!