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<p><a href="/donate">Even More Ways to Donate</a></p>
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<h1><img class="appeal-header" alt="Become a Conservancy Supporter!" src="/img/conservancy-supporter-header.png"/></h1>
<p>Software Freedom needs your help.</p>
<h4>Software Freedom needs your help. </h4>
<p><i>Conservancy must to move to a
Supporter-driven organization so we can focus on critical free software
issues that nobody else is tackling. Stand up for the GPL, support great
member projects, and make your voice heard in support of free software.
<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">Donate today</a></i></p>
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
[FIXME Link to nascar pic]
[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:
[Conservancy Staff Pic, left aligned with successes]
<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>
@@ -172,24 +179,26 @@ forced to radically restructure.</p>
<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>
[GPL copyheart pic, right aligned with following text on left]
<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