projects free and open. The work that we do every day ensures the success and

the continued freedom of the projects that the developers of our member

projects dedicate themselves to. Projects like Git, Samba,

Wine, BusyBox, QEMU, Inkscape, Selenium, and dozens more

[Link to Logo/Conservancy-project-logos-NASCAR-page.png]

<p>We are asking for you

  to <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">join us and become a

    Conservancy Supporter</a> but this is more than our usual annual

  fundraising appeal.  As described in more detail below, after the events 

  of 2015, we must substantially increase our individual support to be able 

  to continue defending software freedom for our member projects and the 

  entire free and open source software community.  We need at least [750] 

  of you to become annual Supporters just to continue our basic community services.

  We need [2500] of you to become annual Supporters now to continue

  our work enforcing copyleft licenses.  If you don't become a Supporter now,

  we will be forced to radically restructure and wind down a substantial portion

  of our operations.</p>

<h4>2015 successes</h4>

Software Freedom Conservancy has had a lot of major successes this year:

<ul>

<li>We brought four new projects under the protection of the

Conservancy: <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/jul/23/qemu-joins/">QEMU</a>,

  the generic machine emulator and

virtualizer, <a href="https://www.bro.org/">The Bro Network Security

Monitor</a>, the <a href="http://www.godotengine.org/">Godot Game Engine</a>,

and <a href="http://outreachy.org">Outreachy</a>, a program dedicated to

helping people from underrepresented groups get involved in free and open

source software. We also worked with the Debian community to launch

the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/aug/17/debian/">Debian

Copyright Aggregation Project</a> at their request.</li>

<li>We <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">supported

the lawsuit</a> Christoph Hellwig has brought against VMware in Germany, the

first case on derivative works and the GPL.</li>

<li>We fought for

and <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/oct/27/DMCA-win/">successfully

earned an exemption from the Library of Congress in the DMCA review

process</a> to legally permit circumvention of encryption on Smart TVs,

ensuring that you are free to hack on the devices that you legally own. </li>

<li>We collaborated with the <a href="https://fsf.org/">Free Software