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<h4>Software Freedom needs your help. </h4>

<p><em>Conservancy is continuing its shift towards being a

Supporter-driven organization so we can focus on critical free software 

issues.  Stand up for the GPL, support great 

member projects, and make your voice heard in support of free software. 

We're counting on you. 

<a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">Donate today!</a></em></p>

<!--- FIXME scale this properly like on VMware page -->

<a href="/img/member-project-logos.png"><img class="appeal-left" src="/img/member-project-logos.png"/></a>

<p>

Software is critical to all of our infrastructure and as a society, we are deeply reliant on the software we use. Making sure our software is free and open is essential to knowing we'll be able to use tomorrow the solutions we invest in today. Software freedom is fundamental — we need it in order to effectively solve our problems in the long term. While the world today is powered increasingly by free software, many

people don't realize is how much support is needed to keep all of these

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.</p>

<p>We are asking for you

  to <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">join us and become a

    Conservancy Supporter</a>. Last year, we said needed at least 750 

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

  services, and we thank you so much that you responded.  But 

  we still need 2,500 (total) of you to become annual Supporters to continue

  our licensing work through 2017, including defending copyleft.  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>

<br clear="left"/>

<h4>2016 successes</h4>

<p>

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

<ul>

<li>We gave keynotes

at <a href="/news/2016/oct/26/karen-sandler-oscon-eu-2016/">OSCON EU</a>, <a href="/news/2016/sep/14/brocon-keynote/">BroCon</a>, <a href="https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-conference-keynote-speakers-and-launch-event/">the NextCloud conference</>, <a href="/blog/2016/aug/16/guadec-2016/">GUADEC</a>, <a href="/news/2016/aug/08/guadec-opensym/">OpenSym 2016</a>, <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/57/">Debconf</a>, <a href"/news/2016/may/31/kuhn-sweden-norway/">OSS 2016</a>, <a href="https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/collection/companies-free-software-and-you/">LibrePlanet</a>, <a href="https://www.openwest.org/keynote/">OpenWest</a>

and participated many more conferences all over the world. We also 

shared our expertise in initiatives

like <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft.org</a>. We participated in

interviews and <a href="/blog/">blogposts</a>, and

Bradley and Karen published episodes of <a href="http://faif.us/">Free as in

Freedom</a>, dedicated to discussing the important issues in software

freedom.</li>

</ul>

<p>And we did <strong>all of this</strong> with a tiny staff of only four full time employees.</p>

<p>We are focused on the most important ethical issues in software

freedom. We work tirelessly and don't shy away from difficult issues.</p>

<p>We're a unique organization &mdash; a staunch defender of copyleft (for Linux,

Debian and many of our member projects), a source of education and champions

of diversity for the community via Outreachy and other programs, and are the

legal home to 40 member projects that are essential to developing free

software.</p>

<p>We undertake these critical programs because they are essential to the

future of technology. We do them because they are right. <strong>But we cannot do

<p>Our fiscal sponsorship model is not financially self-sustaining by itself:

we cannot afford even one staff member and basic overhead with the revenue we

take in from our projects.  With over 1000 supporters, we can now sustain the basic

work and we will survive.  But to thrive, and handle the really complex tasks like

copyright and licensing advice, and license compliance, we need even more

resources.  That's why our final target is 2,500 Supporters.  If you use

or care about our <a href="/members/current/">member projects</a>, which

include some of the most widely used free software, you can help them all

by <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">signing up as a Supporter

today</a>.</p>

<h4>Fighting for the GPL</h4>

<a href="/img/gpl-heart.png"><img class="appeal-right"  src="/img/gpl-heart.png"/></a>

<p>Many consider our GPL compliance and enforcement controversial.   We don't

think it is:  we stand up for the GPL at the request of our member projects, 

the Debian community, and members of the Linux kernel community. 

Most recently, that has resulted in our funding

of the <a href="/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">suit

against VMware</a>, which is the first lawsuit on derivative works and the

GPL (Christoph's case <a href="/news/2016/aug/09/vmware-appeal/">continues on appeal</a>). While this work is extremely important to the continued long-term

success of software freedom and copyleft not to mention in the long term