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<h1>Directors</h1>

<p>Like many non-profits, Conservancy is directed by a

self-perpetuating Board of Directors, who

day-to-day operations of the organization.  The Directorship of the

Conservancy includes both talented non-profit managers and experienced

FLOSS project leaders who can both guide the administrative operations of

the organization as well as mentor member project leaders as needed.  Our

Directors constantly search for additional directors who can contribute a

variety of expertise and perspective related to the Conservancy's

mission.</p>

<p>Currently, the directors of Conservancy are:</p>

<h2>Jeremy Allison</h2>

<p>Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a

group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file

and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet

in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by

all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and

products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba

development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using

the Samba code  commercially.</p>

<p>He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work on improving Samba and

solving the problems of  Windows and Linux interoperability.</p>

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>Bradley M. Kuhn</h2>

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

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

<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>Tony Sebro</h2>

<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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<p>Conservancy provides <a href="/members/services/">many important services</a> for its

  member projects.  Member projects can take directed donations, which

  allows donors to earmark their donations for the benefit of a specific

  FLOSS project.  Conservancy provides fiscal oversight to ensure that

  these funds are spent in a manner that advances the project and fits

  with Conservancy's 501(c)(3) mission to promote, advance, and defend software freedom.</p>

<p>If the member project's leaders want, Conservancy can also hold other

  assets and titles on behalf of the projects, such as copyrights,

  trademarks, domain names, online hosting accounts, and title and ownership

  of physical hardware.  Also at discretion of the project's leaders,

  Conservancy can assist in defending the rights represented in these

  assets.  For example, Conservancy is available to assist member projects

  in enforcing the terms of the projects' FLOSS license.</p>

<p>Finally, developers of Conservancy's member projects, when operating in

  their capacity as project leaders, could receive some protection from personal

  liability for their work on the project.</p>

<p>For further reading on the benefits of Conservancy, a full and detailed <a href="/members/services/">list of Conservancy's

  services for its member projects</a> and a <a href="/members/current/">a

  list of Conservancy's current member projects</a> are available.</p>

  study, improve and share their software.  Conservancy helps protect,

  enable, coordinate, facilitate and defend the public's right to copy,

  share, modify and redistribute FLOSS both non-commercially and

  commercially.  Finally, like most organizations devoted to FLOSS,

  Conservancy opposes the notion of patents that cover software, and urges

  contributors to its member projects not to apply for patents.</p>

<p>Conservancy strives to be as transparent as possible, and makes

  its <a href="/about/filings/">public filings available on its website</a>.

  Our staff <a href="/blog/">blog

  regularly</a> about our activities.

  Finally, <a href="/members/">detailed information about the work that

  Conservancy does for its member projects</a> is also available.</p>

<p>If you have general questions about Conservancy and its

  work, <a href="/about/contact/">contact information</a> is available.

  Conservancy is primarily supported by <a href="/donate">your charitable

  donations</a>.</p>

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{% block subtitle %}Staff - {% endblock %}

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<h1>Staff</h1>

<h2 id="karen">Karen M. Sandler - Executive Director</h2>

<p>Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of Conservancy. Karen is known

as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software, particularly in

relation to the software on medical devices. Prior to joining Conservancy,

she was executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was

general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen

co-organizes <a href="http://www.outreachy.org">Outreachy</a>, the

award-winning outreach program for women globally and for people of color

who are underrepresented in US tech. She is also pro bono counsel to the FSF

and GNOME. Karen is a recipient of the O’Reilly Open Source Award and cohost

of the oggcast <a href="http://faif.us/">Free as in Freedom</a>.</p>

<p>Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she

was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and

Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering

from The Cooper Union.</p>

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

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

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

Freedom</cite></a>.</p>

<h2 id="brett">Brett Smith - Director of Strategic Initiatives</h2>

<p>Brett Smith began his FLOSS advocacy in 2000 at college, organizing

student groups and discussing the issues with professors and journalists.  He

also spent a couple of those summers interning at the Free Software

Foundation, and working in various assisting roles there when he returned to

campus.  Later on he worked as the FSF's License Compliance Engineer from

2006-2012, helping to shepherd the GPLv3 drafting process and do outreach

after the license was released.  From there, he worked as a Systems Engineer

at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and

an <a href="https://arvados.org/">Arvados</a> maintainer at Curoverse before

joining Conservancy as Director of Strategic Initiatives in 2016.  He holds a

BS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.</p>

<h2 id="deb">Deb Nicholson - Director of Community Operations</h2>

<p>Deb Nicholson is the Director of Community Operations at the Software Freedom Conservancy where she supports the work of its member projects and facilitates collaboration with the wider free and open source software community. After years of local organizing on free speech, marriage equality, government transparency and access to the political process, she joined the free software movement in 2006. While working for the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>, she created the Women&rsquo;s Caucus to increase recruitment and retention of women in the free software community. She piloted messaging and directed outreach activities at the Open Invention Network, a shared defensive patent pool for free and open source software. She won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work as <a href="https://mediagoblin.org/">GNU MediaGoblin</a>&lsquo;s Community Liaison and as a founding board member at <a href="https://blog.openhatch.org/2017/celebrating-our-successes-and-winding-down-as-an-organization/">OpenHatch</a>. She also continues to serve as a founding organizer of the <a href="http://seagl.org/">Seattle GNU/Linux Conference</a>, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community.</p>

<p>Deb received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bradford College and lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>

<h2 id="denver">Denver Gingerich - FLOSS License Compliance Engineer</h2>

<p>

Denver works part-time managing the technical side of Conservancy's

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