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Supporting Software Freedom Conservancy Home
Mon, 07 Dec 2015 Linux-libre
Software Freedom Conservancy is trying to change to an individual-supported,
instead of corproate-supported, model and is doing a fundraising campaign to that GitWeb
end. I'm a Supporter of them and wanted to say why.
How To
The Software Freedom Conservancy helps member projects avoid non-profit
administrative stuff so that they can focus on doing what they do best: Write code and Articles
collaborate.
The most important thing that Conservancy does, though, is GPL compliance work. RSS Feed
Free software would probably not be where it is today without copyleft. In an alternate About Me
universe where Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project -- and with it, launched the
free software movement -- but without copyleft, it likely would have been simply Contact Me
gobbled up by proprietary software companies by now and never amounted to much.
If it did somehow survive it'd be much smaller and less relevant and we'd probably not
GPL enforced
have free software in as many places as we do currently.
As Bradley Kuhn said, the GPL is not magic pixie dust. Merely slapping some text on If you appreciate any of the things I
a program doesn't magically make it stay free: It takes work. First, by talking to people am doing you can make a donation.
that are not following the license. If, despite the best efforts to resolve things amicably,
they remain intransigent you have two choices: Give up and let them continue
violating (and in that case why was the program put under the GPL in the first place?),
or push the matter with legal action.
I've heard comments from Bradley Kuhn about how long Conservancy's queue of
violations is so it seems there are too many out there willing to turn a blind eye to GPL
compliance and hope they don't get caught. We need more people doing GPL
enforcement under Conservancy's princinples, not less, but for now the question
before us seems more dire: Do we even want Conservancy's work to continue at all? I
have voted "yes" with my money and I hope you do too.
Copyright © 2015 Jason Self. See license.shtml for license conditions. Please copy and share.