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  <h1><img class="appeal-header" alt="Become a Conservancy Supporter!" src="/img/conservancy-supporter-header.png"/></h1>

The world today is powered increasingly by Free Software. But what 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>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>

<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. In order to effectively continue to serve our member

projects, we need [750] Supporters. If you use or care about

our <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member projects</a>,

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

all by <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">signing up as a

Supporter today</a>.</p>

<h4>Fighting for the GPL</h4>

<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 the Linux kernel community, the Debian community, 

and our member projects. Most recently, that has resulted in our funding

of the <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">suit

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

GPL. While this work is extremely important to the continued long-term

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

interest of the industry as a whole, it makes fundraising from companies

very difficult.  Some companies 

have withdrawn from funding us and some have even successfully pressured 

conferences to cancel or prevent talks on our enforcement work. We do