writing software and books for eCos, although he continued working on the

HETE-2 satellite (an astrophysical Gamma Ray Burst mission) part

time. Mark earned his BA in Physics at Reed College and a PhD from the

Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook. </p>

<h2>Bdale Garbee</h2>

<p><a href="https://gag.com/bdale/">Bdale Garbee</a> has been a contributor

to the Free Software community since 1979.  Bdale's background also includes

many years of hardware design, Unix internals, and embedded systems work.

He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian

GNU/Linux to 5 architectures, served as Debian Project Leader, then

chairman of the Debian Technical Committee for nearly a decade, and remains

active in the Debian community.</p>

<p>Bdale served as an HP Fellow in the Office of the CTO until 2016 where

he led HP's open source strategy work.  Bdale served as President of

Software in the Public Interest for a decade.  He served nearly as long on

the board of directors of the Linux Foundation representing individual

affiliates and the developer community.  Bdale currently serves on the

boards of the Freedombox Foundation, Linux Professional Institute, and

Aleph Objects.</p>

<h2 id="bkuhn">Bradley M. Kuhn</h2>

<a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley M. Kuhn</a> is

the <a href="/about/staff/#bkuhn">Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence</a>

at <a href="/">Software Freedom Conservancy</a> and editor-in-chief

of <a href="https://copyleft.org">copyleft.org</a>. Kuhn began his work in

the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early

adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free

Software projects, including Perl.  He worked during the 1990s as a system

administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP

Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.  Kuhn's

non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF.  As FSF's

Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn

led <a href="https://www.fsf.org/licensing">FSF's GPL enforcement</a>,

launched <a href="https://www.fsf.org/associate/">its Associate Member

program</a>, and invented

the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html">Affero GPL</a>.  Kuhn

was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was

Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and has been a

full-time staffer since early 2011.  Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in

Computer Science

from <a href="http://www.loyola.edu/academic/computerscience">Loyola

University in Maryland</a>, and an M.S. in Computer Science from

the <a href="http://www.cs.uc.edu/">University of

Cincinnati</a>.  <a href="http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/thesis/">Kuhn's

Master's thesis</a> discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free

Software programming languages.  Kuhn received

the <a href="http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/25039">O'Reilly

Open Source Award in 2012</a>, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on

copyleft licensing.  Kuhn has <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/">a

blog</a> and co-hosts

the audcast, <a href="http://faif.us/"><cite>Free as in Freedom</cite></a>.

<h2>Mike Linksvayer</h2>

<p>Mike Linksvayer serves on the boards of AcaWiki and OpenHatch,

and on the Open Definition Advisory Council, and is Policy Director at GitHub.

Previously Mike was CTO, VP, and a Senior Fellow at Creative Commons, and a

co-founder of Bitzi, an early open content/open

data mass collaboration platform.</p>

<h2>Martin Michlmayr</h2>

<p>Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source

software projects for over 20 years.  He acted as the leader of the

Debian project for two years, served on the board of the Open Source

Initiative (OSI) for six years and currently serves on the board of

Software Freedom Conservancy.  Martin earned a PhD from the University

of Cambridge and he received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2013 for

his contributions to the open source community.</p>

<h2>Allison Randal</h2>

<p>Over the course of multiple decades as a free software developer,

Allison has worked in a wide variety of projects and domains, from

games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, shipping

fulfillment, and talking smart-home appliances, to programming language

design, compilers, hypervisors, containers, deployment automation,

database replication, and operating systems.</p>

<p>She is a board member at the Perl Foundation, a board member at the

OpenStack Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for

free software community leaders. At various points in the past she has

served as president of the Open Source Initiative, president of the Perl

Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chairman of

the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine,

Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON,

Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical,

Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at HP, and

Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian project,

and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at the

University of Cambridge.</p>

<p>Tony currently serves as the Deputy General Counsel for

    the <a href="https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Home">Wikimedia

    Foundation</a>, where he manages the day-to-day operations of Wikimedia's

    legal department, and provide specific expertise on free and open source

    licensing, intellectual property, non-profit law, and privacy matters.

    Tony is also an organizer of

    Conservancy's <a href="https://outreachy.org">Outreachy</a> project,

    which provides paid internships in free and open source for people from

    groups traditionally underrepresented in tech.  Prior to joining

    Wikimedia, Tony served as General Counsel (and “Employee #2”)

    of Software Freedom Conservancy for over six years.  Tony has also spent

    time in the private sector with PCT Law Group and Kenyon & Kenyon, and as

    an intellectual property licensing and business development professional

    with IBM.  Tony received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2017.  Tony is

    an active participant in and supporter of the non-profit community, and

    lives in the Bay Area with his family.</p>

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{% include "opengraph_partial.html" with url="/supporter/" title="Support Conservancy!" description="Software freedom is critical to many of today’s most pressing social issues, but it’s only effective when FOSS is for everyone. Support Conservancy today to help make that happen!" %}

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<span id="form-correction-needed" class="form-error">Please ensure all form data above is correct.</span>

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<div class="expandable-section">

<div class="picture-small right">

  <img src="/img/2020_Sebro-Tony_CopyleftConf.jpg" alt="Tony Sebro speaks on stage in front of a slide comparing 1800&rsquo;s Eschatology and Golden Era Hip Hop">

</div>

<p>2020 has been a difficult year. We&rsquo;ve all scrambled to keep ourselves

and our loved-ones safe and healthy, coped with the isolation connected

to lockdowns and quarantines, and dealt with the

disconnection from our support networks — including friends, family

and even childcare. We worried about racial equality and hope the fight for

social justice will result in basic rights that everyone deserves.</p>

<p>Throughout all of this, Conservancy remained focused on its mission and on

the free and open source software community. While cheering those working to help prevent the

spread of COVID-19 and those fighting for racial equality, we know our

expertise, skills, and mission can only tangentially improve those situations. While

<a href="/blog/2020/apr/21/workduringcovid/">contributing

where we can</a>, we remain focused on the long-term nature of

software freedom. We keep working to grow and support FOSS

communities to plan for ethical technology down the road, so that software

freedom can be in the service of human freedom.</p>

<p>We&rsquo;re proud of how much we&rsquo;ve been able to accomplish in the last year,

even in the face of so many obstacles.</p>

<a class="expander" data-expand-link-text="(Expand All Sections)"></a>

<h3 id="StayingConnected">Staying Connected</h3>

<div data-read-more="Read more about staying connected&hellip;">

<p>We helped folks stay connected, even when travel

and in-person meetings could not happen. We gathered digitally every

Thursday with all who wanted to join since early March to discuss

important issues or just reach out to other people who care about software freedom. The topics of these chats varied widely from

helping family and friends to use FOSS tools to discussing impactful

presentations concerting copyleft to how to dismantle systemic racism in free software to

important software freedom policy issues like standing up to fight the

DMCA.</p>

</div>

<h3 id="PayingPeople">Paying People to Work on Software Freedom</h3>

<div data-read-more="Read more about paying people to work on software freedom&hellip;">

<p>Our Outreachy internship program became even more essential during this

difficult time.  Everyone needs remote work now, <em>and</em> to learn how

to effectively work remotely.  This year, we achieved the most internships in

a single year yet!

We funded over 100 interns across two cohorts, generating

new code, new documentation, and essential FOSS contributions.  Outreachy

also prepares its interns for remote-work careers in FOSS, providing access to opportunities after their internship is over.

Since traveling is unsafe during a pandemic, interns could not use the Outreachy travel stipend for in-person conferences or events.

We moved quickly to pay all 127 active travel stipends simply as additional intern bonuses, helping both current interns and many alums during this stressful time.</p>

<p>We hear the news consistently that this pandemic has hit underrepresented groups harder for the same

reasons of systemic bias that we’ve talked about for years in Outreachy. We’ve worked to make the program more stable and to diversify its funding so that we can support even more internships going forward.

We&rsquo;re proud to help in our own small way.</p>

<p>It&rsquo;s not just interns we fund.  Overall, Conservancy funded 27 contractors for a

total of about $650,000 and 16 grantees about $100,000 in the last 12 months.

That&rsquo;s three-quarters of a million dollars of funded FOSS work for the public good in just one year! And along with our internships, we spent a total of $1.5 million! The contractors spanned 15 projects and accomplished some impressive work. Our contractors report publicly on their work and you can see the <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2020-10/">Reproducible Builds team</a> helping us know we can rely on the software we use, the <a href="https://sage.thesharps.us/2020/11/05/2020-10-outreachy-progress/">Outreachy team</a> organizing the complex and resource intensive internship program, <a href="https://github.com/mauriciofauth">phpMyAdmin</a>  continuing their longstanding work to maintain and improve one of the most popular MySQL administration tools and the <a href="https://godotengine.org/article/improvements-gpuparticles-godot-40">Godot team</a> as they work to make the best game engine ever.</p>

<p>Our contractors write, document, and share great

FOSS that benefits the general public; there is no other organization in

the world that pays contractors that much money with that as their primary

directive.  Sure, companies write lots of FOSS, but they focus only on projects that

benefit their profit motive and self-interest.  We fund FOSS development that benefits everyone and we

only fund software development that completely respects your software freedom and

rights.</p>

</div>

<h3 id="Policy">Policy</h3>

<div data-read-more="Read more about our policy work this year&hellip;">

<p>This year, we expanded our plans and involvement on key issues of software

freedom policy.  We are known throughout the FOSS community as the

organization that knows the details of FOSS policy — from project governance, to licensing to Codes of

Conduct — and gets those details

right.  We help our projects with everything from minor disagreements among

leadership to major licensing challenges that threaten the future of their

project.  While we can’t tell every one of these stories on our blog,

just ask anyone in our Project Leadership Committees and they’ll surely

tell you that Conservancy knows our stuff and handles any issues of this nature that occur.</p>

<p>Whenever possible, though, Conservancy does our policy work in public as key activists for software freedom. We <a href="/news/2020/jan/15/googlevoracle/">added our voice</a> to important legal cases like Google v. Oracle.  We provided context to interpret issues arising over the year, such as the launch of <a href="/blog/2020/jul/09/org-proliferation/">new organizational solutions for FOSS</a> and <a href="/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-riaa-youtube-dl/">DMCA aggression towards FOSS projects</a>.  We presented new ways to think about our critical problems, like legal mechanisms to achieve <a href="/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality/">copyleft equality</a> in the face of proprietary relicensing, ways to <a href="/blog/2019/dec/19/CPupdate/">support maintainers in employment contracts</a>, and extend protection of FOSS projects from <a href="/blog/2020/nov/13/widevine-dmca-takedown/">aggressive DMCA takedowns</a>.  We successfully filed for a <a href="/news/2020/jul/30/refile2020/">renewal of the Smart TV DMCA exemption</a> that we achieved in 2015.  We

went even further this year, and applied for <a href="/blog/2020/sep/16/dmca-exemptions-2020/">three more exemptions</a> that would protect the rights of those who use interconnected devices that have become critical fixtures in everyone&rsquo;s lives.</p>

<p>Most importantly, Conservancy remains the only charity actively fighting for the rights ensured by GPL on Linux. Our focus remains on IoT and embedded devices

that are now ubiquitous and used by everyone.  While we can only <a href="/blog/2019/oct/02/cambium-ubiquiti-gpl-violations/">occasionally discuss GPL enforcement matters publicly</a>, we launched this

year our <a href="/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-strategy.html">Strategic GPL Enforcement Plan</a>, and our companion <a href="/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liberation.html">Firmware Liberation Project</a>.  These two new initiatives have

just begun and they need your support and help to succeed.</p>

</div>

<h3 id="NewMembers">New Member Projects and New Board Member</h3>

<div data-read-more="Read more about our new member projects and board member&hellip;">

<p>In 2020, Conservancy welcomed two important new projects.  The <a href="/news/2020/jul/21/ICRjoins/">Institute for Computing in Research</a> runs a mentoring program designed to bridge inequities in tech by training teenage students to do rigorous scientific research using free software. <a href="/news/2020/sep/10/openwrt-joins/">OpenWrt</a> is a critical FOSS wireless router project that demonstrates the long lasting positive  results of strategic GPL enforcement. We also recognize that communities change over time. In addition to adding new projects, we took the time this past year to sunset some of our projects that no longer had a charitable focus.</p>

<p>We were also pleased to welcome <a href="/news/2020/jan/03/arandal/">Allison Randal</a>, a steadfast advocate of software freedom, to our Board of Directors.</p>

</div>

<h3 id="Events">Events and Conferences</h3>

<div data-read-more="Read more about our events and conferences&hellip;">

<p>FOSS events and conferences have always been an essential component of FOSS,

but this year, the pandemic thwarted our usual event system an infrastructure.

Conservancy has been at the center of transitioning events to online formats for

both our  member

projects and other third party  other FOSS conferences and event groups.  People around the world took huge losses in travel and event

cancellations, but we were adept.  We acted early and saved tens of thousands for

our member projects by negotiating with canceled venues.  We quickly adjusted

our travel policy to handle pandemic refund procedures, and we posted those changes publicly for other organizations to benefit.  When it’s safe and healthy for everyone to travel again, we plan to organize Copyleft Conf, SeConf, and the dozens of in-person hackfests.  Meanwhile, we have and will continue to

help our projects cancel or reschedule their events and, as we did for our member projects like Racket and Selenium, to operate as virtual events this year.</p>