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 brought three new projects under the protection of Conservancy: <a href="https://forums.librehealth.io/">LibreHealth</a>, a critical initiative for health in free and open source software, <a href="https://www.spec-ops.io/">Spec-Ops</a>, a project dedicated to creating of open standards in critical areas, including payments and identity

and <a href="http://brew.sh/">Homebrew</a>, a software package manager for Apple's OS X. </li>

<li>We <a href="/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">supported

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

first case on derivative works and the GPL. Christoph's case <a href="/news/2016/aug/09/vmware-appeal/">continues on appeal</a>.</li>

<li>We helped Conservancy projects Bro, Buildbot, and Godot receive Mozilla MOSS grants. Another Conservancy project, phpMyAdmin, successfully completed a thorough security audit as part of Mozilla's Secure Open Source Fund (no serious issues were found!).</li>

<li>We <a href="/news/2016/may/10/yorba-assigns-copyrights/">received an assignment of copyrights from the Yorba Foundation</a>, including Shotwell and Geary, in order to safeguard those copyrights for the future.</li>

<li>We conducted friendly discussions with companies out of compliance with

the GPL, seeking non-litigious resolutions in accordance with our <a href="/copyleft-compliance/principles.html">Principles</a>. We <a href="/news/2016/nov/03/linux-compliance-agreements/">published our template agreements</a> and held two <a href="https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/706361/a9ca4ee12c04d5d7/">feedback</a> <a href="/blog/2016/oct/27/feedback-gpl/"> sessions</a> to evaluate and improve our compliance efforts. We also worked with other community members to <a href="/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick-mchardy-gpl-enforcement/">bring clarity to international activities around GPL compliance</a> and help make the ecosystem safer for free software adoption. We stayed committed to providing <a href="/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/">straightforward analysis about the GPL</a>.</li>

<li>Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler, <a href="/news/2016/feb/23/FOSSA-testimony/">testified to the New York City Council Committee on Contracts in favor of the Free and Open Source Software Act and the Civic Commons Act</a> which would increase the use of free and open source software by New York City departments and agencies. Karen later in the year also <a href="/news/2016/oct/26/karen-sandler-oscon-eu-2016/">taught kids in London about free software</a>.</li>

<li>We <a href="/blog/2016/jun/06/openchain-spec/">commented on the OpenChain specification</a> to help make sure that the initiative by companies to collaboratively come up with standards and shared materials around compliance also meets community expectations about how compliance obligations are satisfied.</li>

<li>We supported, helped coordinate, and financially backed volunteers from 

  our member projects to organize seven conferences in three continents, where thousands of

  attendees learned about free and open source software.</li>

<!-- conledger -V -b 2015-01-01 --limit 'tag("Approval") =~ /\/2015/ and tag("TaxImplication") !~ /(Reimbursement|USA-501c3|Corporation|Tax-Payment|LLC|W2|Refund)/' reg '/Assets/'|wc -l -->

<!--<li>We made FIXME contractor payments to developers writing free and open source 

  software, which included various different internships and contract

  software development work.</li> -->

<!--  conledger -V -b 2015-01-01 --limit 'tag("Approval") =~ /\/2015/ and tag("TaxImplication") =~ /Reimbursement/' reg '/Assets/'|egrep '^2015'|wc -l -->

<!-- <li>We processed and paid FIXME reimbursement requests to individuals doing work

  around the globe advocating for their free and open source software

  projects at conferences and other venues.</li> -->

<li>We processed and paid reimbursementrequests to individuals doing work

  around the globe advocating for their free and open source software

  projects at conferences and other venues. We also paid contractors to 

improve our projects' software.</li>

<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 gave

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

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

Freedom</a>, all 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