Sustainers help us do our work in a strategic, long-term way. We could not do this without the support and financial contributions of individuals like you. You can see a list of our Sustainers here.
The wide range of work we engage in is supported by people like you.
We are so proud to be funded by individuals and stay unbeholden to corporate interests and pressures. We stand up for developers, consumers and those who have been historically excluded. We work to make technology truly fair for all.
Thank you for helping making this work possible:
- Standing up for consumer rights in copyleft compliance
- Supporting Outreachy with its increasing number of interns
- Bringing legal action against prolific license violators
- Hiring team members to get projects like Reproducible Builds to continue pushing the forefront of software reproducibility
Our Year in Review
This past year we've all grown more conscious of our interconnected world and the importance of free software tools that empower us all. Closed source and proprietary tooling has taken over many communication channels while we work from home. Even conferences and lecture series dedicated to 'open source infrastructure' have been unable to escape the grasp of closed systems. We made it a priority to support those in our community that understand the crucial need for the need for a conferences run by free software and have been pleased to support free communication tools to assist with these efforts. Our commitment to using, developing, and supporting free software tools and communities has never been stronger.
Over the past year we have taken on a lot of new work that wouldn't have been possible without your support. Our lawsuit against long time license violator Vizio is one of those projects. Software Freedom Conservancy continues to lead the field in standing up for license compliance and holding corporations accountable. This focus on consumer rights, in regards to software licensing, is a critical approach developed by our amazing policy and legal experts. We believe software freedom should be a tool that enables everyone to hold their technology and its providers accountable to the people who are impacted by it. Click here for more information.
We also proud to share highlights of our work on the DMCA exceptions and clarification for jailbreaking of routers, investigation of license compliance and privacy-related research. Karen, our executive director also participated in getting an exemption for medical devices. We continue to push back against the extreme wealth and legal power that corporations and lobbyists assert over consumers. We work to fight this overreach one bit at a time.
Highlights from some of our member projects
Software Freedom Conservancy have helped our projects engage in critical work this year. Overall, we funded $1.7 million in work to improve software freedom, this year alone!
We helped Outreachy expand to its largest cohorts ever. Our last round accepted 71 interns, and we announced this week that the current round will have 62! (that's 133 interns, an 27% growth from the previous two rounds!) We're grateful to be able support Outreachy to serve more communities who are committed to helping to push back against systemic underrepresentation in technology and software.
Godot has continued to push the boundary of what we thought was possible with an open source game engine, with an impressive team contracted by Software Freedom Conservancy. The team is building their community and we are so proud to see how their focus on community has been to their benefit. To see the cutting edge of what creators are making, see their newest showreel.
Software Freedom Conservancy is also proud to support the Reproducible Builds team as they ensure the security of computer systems of all shapes and sizes around the world. We know that as time goes on we'll see how necessary and vital this project is. The tools they've made are freely available to help others increase reproducibility in their own projects.
OpenWrt had their OpenWrt 21.02 release which increases the default security options including optional SELinux and ASLR. This project empowers users to run a free operating system on their routers, and combined with our DMCA exemption, makes the landscape of free firmware much easier to explore and deploy. Another member project, coreboot, has further grown the supported hardware list for freeing your bootloader. These two projects are at the core of our firmware liberation initiation. As more and more companies find out, consumers are drawn to hardware that can run copyleft software and contrary to popular belief, are willing to pay for it!
The Institute for Computing in Research has furthered it's mission by expanding it's intern cohort to include a selection of six high school students in Portland, Oregon. This unique paid internship introduces high school students to software freedom as part of a summer research position that focuses on introducing young scholars to computing in areas of physical science, life science, social science, arts, and humanities. Supported by academics at Portland State University, Reed College, and Oregon State University, the cohort in Portland has projects in computational biology, natural language processing, pure math, and AI and game theory.
New staff!
At the end of last year we were able to hire Sage Sharp as Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion and they are rounding out their first year with us. And finishing up his first six months is Daniel Pono Takamori our Community Organizer & Non-Profit Problem Solver. These two have been very welcome additions to our team of just five full time employees, and one part time employee. We are proud of the breadth of skills and dedication of our team.
As a testament to "practice what you preach", we undertook what we consider a fair and equitable hiring process which our executive director Karen wrote about here. We lead by example with transparency and making sure we cast a wide net to avoid just hiring within our circles.
We also spent some time updating our website to make it easier to use and better convey our mission and work. Our chat platform moved to XMPP. Bridging to IRC and Matrix is supported, so you are welcome to join with whatever client you like (unlike other loose options). As mentioned above, we are committed to using free software for communication and demonstrating that organizations of all sizes can make the same commitment.
Writing and Speaking
Software Freedom Conservancy team members published some very important writings this year to both give further historical context and modern interpretation. Denver Gingerich wrote about the installation requirement for the GPLv2. Bradley Kuhn documented the historical record in his related piece about “Tivoization” and Your Right to Install Under Copyleft. And he writes about It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights, which garnered a lot of great community conversations. In another vein, Sage Sharp of Outreachy wrote a tremendous piece titled So you want to apologize… Now what?, which has helped explain the entire life cycle apologizing for your own behavior. We can all learn from this piece about how to act more humanely in our shared spaces of production.
This was another long year of online conferences. While the traveling was easier (by not doing it), we miss the face to face relationship building that we've come to expect from our big conference gatherings. We can't wait to get back to a sense of normalcy and at least have a little less latency between us.
Karen, our executive director, gave two keynotes this year, one at the Leuven AI Law & Ethics Conference and another at Linux App Summit. Karen also spoke with Marina Zhurakhinskaya at All Things Open about the 10+ year history of Outreachy. She was also an invited speaker at Big Data, A.I. and Healthy Longevity. How to progress faster and better for all scientists.
Karen and Bradley were also co-organizers (with others) of the Legal & Policy Devroom at FOSDEM, where they also moderated panels and spoke. Sage Sharp spoke at the Chan Zuckerberg Essential Open Source event. Daniel Pono Takamori gave a talk about "How Free Software Continues the Legacy of Open Communication" to the Portland Linux/ Unix Group.
We were also a sponsor of the fantastic SeaGL event. A community focused conference that does an incredible job giving opportunities to first-time speakers (suitable for community members of all walks of life). They hosted their conference on the Matrix platform, which further proved it's possible to run a virtual conference with free software.
Help us Continue this Work
We are beyond thankful for ability to continue our work due to your financial contributions. We recognize that not everyone has the same financial leeway to donate as they have in the past. But please consider giving what you can so that our organization can continue to advocate and support the rights of all software users. We will continue to work as hard as we can with our small staff. And we hope that through our hard work, creativity and passionate dedication, we've demonstrated over the years how Software Freedom Conservancy continues to be the beacon of change for software freedom that the world needs. Please consider donating here.
Vintage-shirt-wearing Sustainers pose with Karen!
From left: Stefano “Zack” Zacchiroli, Karen M. Sandler, John Sullivan, and Jim Wright
We know you are sick of hearing about supply chains, global shortages, and deliveries being delayed. But we must be up front that since we have a small staff we try to batch our t-shirt orders, and given the realities of the pandemic we are somewhat behind on our t-shirt deliveries. We're working on a new t-shirt design for this year and will send everybody their shirts after the end of this fundraiser. We so appreciate everyone's patience!
Vintage T-Shirt Promotion
If you're a Sustainer, you've already received or will soon receive a t-shirt in our 2018 design shown here. But, would you like to take advantage of a last chance to get our vintage design — seen sported so often by our earliest Sustainers at conferences and events? If so, read on!
Brett Smith wears the current t-shirt design.
UPDATE: Just give $256 total for this year's fundraiser and receive an additional vintage T-shirt!
But first, as a note to how difficult this year has been, we know that many of our 2019 Sustainers are still awaiting their t-shirts, which have the wonderful 2018 design. We've had difficulty working through keeping our staff safe during the pandemic lock downs and making trips to the post office — historically, we on staff all shared the post office trips, but we all have different COVID-19 risk factors and thus it's all moving slowly. We appreciate the patience of our Sustainers waiting for t-shirts, and we do have plan to safely send out the backlog by years' end.
As part of those preparations, we found a treasure trove and now have an exciting promotion for renewing Sustainers. We found an old stash of vintage t-shirts, in the old style! Supplies are limited, but for those few sustainers who would like to receive one, we have a special offer. Sustainers who give $256 or more between 2020-01-15 and 2021-01-15 can receive one of these vintage t-shirts! To claim your vintage t-shirt, do the following:
Neil McGovern wearing that stylish vintage shirt!
- Renew as a an annual sustainer for $256 or more. (Alternatively, if you already gave this year, make a separate donation so that your 2020 total is $256.)
- Email <vintaget@sfconservancy.org> and include the email address and date(s) of your donation(s) that total $256 and your desired size. (We have all sizes except MenM in stock. Supplies are limited; we cannot necessarily guarantee your size selection, and we'll continue to update here as sizes run out.)
Supplies won't last; give $256 and make one of these vintage shirts yours today!
You too can look cool in the vintage design. Or maybe your original has faded and you're ready to spruce up with a new one? As we said, supplies are limited so make a big donation today, support Conservancy, and show you've always been old-school — or just want to look that way!