From pono at sfconservancy.org Thu Jan 6 20:44:10 2022 From: pono at sfconservancy.org (Daniel Pono Takamori) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2022 12:44:10 -0800 Subject: Fundraising match goal reached (and surpassed) in record time Message-ID: Fundraising match goal reached (and surpassed) in record time! URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/jan/06/2021-fundraiser-matched/ Links to social media: https://mastodon.technology/@conservancy/107577457239230260 https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1479191562357645312 We're amazed and humbled to announce that, thanks to an unprecedented outpouring of support, Software Freedom Conservancy has already surpassed this year's match challenge. Despite the goal being the most ambitious one yet, this is the fastest we've ever reached this milestone. Donations are continuing to come in. As the number creeps higher as we near our fundraiser end date of January 15, we believe that each dollar above our goal sends this message loud and clear: pursuing software freedom is an important goal for our society. We are proud of our sustainers and donors who, even during this difficult time, have contributed towards our work. We are so excited to continue doing the important work like what we accomplished in the past year: Diversity and outreach efforts [0] Raising, administering, and facilitating $1.7 million [1] to directly fund free software development Continuing to stand up for copyleft, like we are doing in our newest lawsuit against longtime license violator Vizio [2] It is our incredible pleasure to be funded by people like you so that we can remain unbeholden to corporate interests and pursue software freedom for all above all else. Whether donors gave $31, $127 or $10,004, every single dollar makes a huge difference. With this historic match challenge completed, we're excited to go into this new year with the support of you all. Thank you so much for contributing and let's see which prime number we will hit in the next 10 days! Donate here [3] [0] - https://outreachy.org [1] - https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/#Highlights [2] - https://sfconservancy.org/vizio [3] - https://sfconservancy.org/donate From info at sfconservancy.org Thu Jun 16 21:19:06 2022 From: info at sfconservancy.org (Software Freedom Conservancy) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 14:19:06 -0700 Subject: Remembering and Honoring Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Founder of Outreachy Message-ID: Remembering and Honoring Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Founder of Outreachy URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/jun/14/remembering-marina/ Links to social media: https://mastodon.technology/web/@conservancy/108478308638397905 https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1536845655364149248 It is with great sadness that we write about the death of one of the most significant contributors to Free and Open Source Software, Marina Zhurakhinskaya. Marina was a force for change and leaves a profound legacy of diversity, inclusion, equity and justice. It is impossible to imagine what Software Freedom Conservancy and Outreachy would be like without Marina. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Marina moved to the United States after completing high school. She was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after less than a year in the United States and graduated from MIT with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science. After working at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for several years, she joined Red Hat, a company focused on open source solutions for the enterprise market. While at Red Hat, Marina began to contribute to the GNOME desktop, working as a developer on GNOME Shell, and then became active in the GNOME community. Marina tirelessly created and improved systems to help new people contribute to GNOME and free software, generally. She created a mentors list for GNOME as well as a newcomers' tutorial. She helped improve GNOME's participation in Google Summer of Code. In 2009, Marina reinvented a program to provide paid internships for women to contribute to GNOME. That program, which Marina carefully architected and continued to lead and collaborate on for the next decade, became GNOME's Outreach Program for Women and ultimately grew into Outreachy, an internship program for everyone subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation — one of the most important programs of Software Freedom Conservancy. Marina always cared about getting the details right. This dedication was consistently reflected in her meticulous efforts to document Outreachy's processes and to keep records of the successes of the program. Marina's caring and enthusiasm for Outreachy's participants resulted in deep relationships with many of the program's alums. Marina celebrated every conference presentation by former participants in the program, and any news of their career developments. Along with Karen Sandler, Marina refined and grew the program beyond GNOME to include more open source communities. Since Marina ran the first round of the program in 2010, 846 people have successfully completed the program. When Outreach Program for Women became much bigger than just including GNOME participants, Marina stewarded the transition to Software Freedom Conservancy, where she led the effort to rebrand the program as Outreachy. She worked with Sage Sharp to develop the program's operations go become the program it is today, with well over 100 interns per year. Marina remained a critical voice and active participant (along with Karen, Sage and Tony Sebro) on Outreachy's Leadership Committee. Marina was active in the Leadership Committee until her last few days. Marina diligently sought and found opportunities to create systemic change; she was recognized for these contributions. Marina was elected to and served on the GNOME board of Directors as well as the Ada Initiative's Board. In 2012, Marina was awarded the "Pants Award" by the GNOME Foundation — the community's highest honor awarded annually. She was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2015, and a Silver Stevie award in the “Women Helping Women” category in 2016. Along with Karen, she accepted the Award for Social Benefit for Free Software on behalf of Outreachy in 2014. Marina was proud of her more than 16 years of work for Red Hat. Following her technical role, she transitioned to the position of Senior Outreach Specialist, Community Diversity and Inclusion at Red Hat. Marina's role included her work on Outreachy in addition to working on ed Hat's own efforts to support diversity and combat bias in its operations and in open source communities. Marina created Red Hat’s diversity scholarships for DevConf.US and DevConf.CZ conferences, which have supported over 40 scholarship recipients. Marina was diagnosed with breast cancer three and a half years ago, and, with characteristic determination, not only left no stone unturned in her own treatment, but connected, became friends, and shared her knowledge with many others dealing with this awful disease. She died on June 11, 2022. Marina is survived by her husband, Owen Taylor, an important contributor to the GNOME Desktop and fellow Red Hat employee, and their three children. Marina encouraged people to take advantage of available, life-saving genetic testing for mutations that cause breast cancer and other diseases, and we elevate that message today. The family has asked for donations in Marina's honor to Dana Farber's Metastatic Breast Cancer Research Fund [0] or Outreachy [1]. We share the grief with everyone in the GNOME, Outreachy, and Red Hat communities. Please support each other, and be kind to yourself. We encourage community members to take the time they need to remember and honor Marina. Past Outreachy interns, mentors, and community coordinators are encouraged to contact Outreachy organizers if they wish to participate in a private Outreachy chat thread to honor Marina. [0] https://danafarber.jimmyfund.org/site/TR?team_id=6863&fr_id=1200&pg=team [1] https://www.outreachy.org/sponsor/donate/ From pono at sfconservancy.org Wed Nov 23 15:38:03 2022 From: pono at sfconservancy.org (Daniel Pono Takamori) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2022 07:38:03 -0800 Subject: $104,759 pledged for software freedom! Message-ID: $104,759 pledged for software freedom! Help us unlock our match challenge URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/nov/22/2022-fundraiser/ Social media: https://social.sfconservancy.org/notice/APsFbCFObYzLpg6Y2i https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1595164603872608256 We're pleased to announce an ambitious match challenge for this fundraising season. As a non-profit dedicated to upholding user freedoms and protections against corporate and other interests that may not be in the public's general interest, we rely upon the donations from our individual sustainers. Software Freedom Conservancy has been growing and is able to take on the work it does thanks to the incredible support of individuals who care about an organization who stands up for the equitable, ethical and end user focused technologies [0]. This year's match is comprised of donations solely by individual donors -- a few large anonymous donors as well as a handful of smaller donors who are planning to give just a little bit more this year to challenge SFC supporters to make their annual Sustainer contribution go further. These smaller donors include (in first name alphabetical order): Asumu Takikawa, Elizabeth Joseph, John Sullivan, Justin Flory and Will Norris, all of whom care deeply about software freedom. We are excited to highlight them over the next few weeks. These generous donations raise our match fund to $104,759, so be sure to donate by January 16 to maximize their donations! This year has been packed with growth for SFC and exciting work in free software, including our historic consumer rights lawsuit to promote copyleft [1], the diversity and inclusion efforts of Outreachy & The Institute for Computing in Research, and our support of all of our wonderful member projects. Thank you so much for your support and please consider becoming a Sustainer now. https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#sustainers [0] https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/#YearInReview [1] https://sfconservancy.org/vizio/ From pono at sfconservancy.org Mon Nov 28 21:32:18 2022 From: pono at sfconservancy.org (Daniel Pono Takamori) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:32:18 -0800 Subject: Stockfish: Chess GPLv3 Violation Lawsuit Settles Message-ID: Stockfish: Chess GPLv3 Violation Lawsuit Settles SFC Named as Trusted Party To Verify Future Corresponding Source URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/nov/28/sfc-named-trusted-party-in-gpl-case/ Links to social media: https://social.sfconservancy.org/notice/AQ4ftINvUTSImYwgts https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1597338038409252864 Stockfish, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) chess engine, has announced the settlement of their lawsuit [0] against ChessBase GmbH regarding violations of Stockfish's license, the General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). Software Freedom Conservancy is excited to announce our role in this historic violation settlement. Specifically, SFC has been named in the settlement agreement [1] as the trusted third-party to analyze and approve any complete “Corresponding Source” releases by ChessBase in the future. SFC is honored that the parties chose us to carry out this critical duty. As a litigant ourselves in unrelated copyleft enforcement litigation, we know well that ongoing compliance, and assuring that the rights of the community of users remains respected for the years after the litigation completes, is the most important work of software freedom. We also appreciate the trust that the FOSS community places in SFC as arbiters on behalf of consumers and users, of what various copyleft licenses (such as the GPLv2 and GPLv3) require with regard to complete, corresponding source (CCS). Too often, those who enforce the GPL focus so much on the copyright infringement they have suffered and forget the policy goal of all copyleft licenses: to guarantee that users and consumers get the methods, means, and technical details on how to make real use of the software rights and freedoms that the licenses promise. We congratulate both parties in this litigation for coming to an amicable agreement that makes a plan to put those rights of users first and foremost in an ongoing way. [0] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/chessbase-stockfish-agreement/ [1] https://stockfishchess.org/files/settlement_english.pdf From pono at sfconservancy.org Tue Dec 6 16:28:10 2022 From: pono at sfconservancy.org (Daniel Pono Takamori) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2022 08:28:10 -0800 Subject: Denver Gingerich Appointed SFC's first Director of Compliance Message-ID: Denver Gingerich Appointed SFC's first Director of Compliance Gingerich to coordinate and lead SFC's continued GPL enforcement URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/dec/05/director-of-compliance-denver-gingerich/ Links to social media: https://social.sfconservancy.org/notice/AQJB5srr5SYgzAgvSa https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1599871550840537088 Today Software Freedom Conservancy announces that as part of its ongoing efforts to achieve widespread GPL compliance across the tech industry, SFC promotes Denver Gingerich to Director of Compliance. SFC is the only organization actively defending [0] Linux's license (the GPL version 2) among the various other projects for which SFC enforces. While enforcing the GPL (and other FOSS licenses) is never SFC's preferred approach, the number of egregious violations of the GPL (including examples such as Vizio [1]) requires SFC to take action given its charitable mission of sustaining FOSS projects, which cannot exist without a fair reciprocal relationship in the organizations and for-profit companies that use them. As part of its commitment, SFC is continually looking for additional resources and new ways of ensuring the key reciprocal relationship of copyleft is upheld. While SFC only uses lawsuits as a last resort, it is a sad fact that more and more companies have dug in their heels instead of complying with the clear text of the GPL and other FOSS licenses when we ask them to. As a result, SFC will focus its efforts, as necessary, on increasing its capacity to work with such companies. SFC is pleased that Gingerich is increasing his involvement to improve the community relationships in FOSS by increasing compliance through various means (primarily educational) to get us back to the reciprocity that copyleft licenses codify in their text. “We met Denver just a few months after SFC's founding, and he was one of the first people to report a GPL violation to us. Since then, he's worked with us part-time, providing an incredible balance of expertise and engineering skill required to build from source offerings”, said Bradley M. Kuhn, SFC's Policy Fellow and member of our Board of Directors. Bradley added: “It has been an honor for me to mentor Denver all these years. His FOSS license knowledge and a passion for advocacy around software right to repair today ranks him among the highest echelon of FOSS advocates. He has led our community engagement with the Right to Repair movement in his decade-plus of work with SFC. I am so glad to welcome him into an expanded role as our first Director of Compliance.”  Gingerich brings more than 11 years of experience at SFC with him to his new role as Director of Compliance, while also participating in FOSS business endeavors outside of Conservancy, showing FOSS is not only pro-business, but leads to more sustainable business models and thoughtful businesses. Gingerich's experience in both fields makes him uniquely qualified to help businesses understand why FOSS licenses exist and how to be good stewards of the FOSS that these businesses modify and redistribute. Denver has been very active in many of SFC's compliance initiatives in the past, including, working with specific companies [2] about their compliance [3], helping to explain how copyleft licenses work [4] and recently debuted our new copyright assignment project [5]. He has spoken at conferences like Copyleft Conf [6] and written extensively on misconceptions of compliance [7] while keeping an eye on legislation and other timely issues for copyleft [8]. Recently Gingerich has been leading efforts for SFC to collaborate with other Right to Repair organizations. [0] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ [1] https://sfconservancy.org/vizio [2] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla-owners/ [3] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/02/cambium-ubiquiti-gpl-violations/ [4] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ [5] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/may/02/copyright-assignment-project/ [6] https://2019.copyleftconf.org/schedule/presentation/6/ [7] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/dec/11/compliance2/ [8] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/nov/06/helping-each-other-right-to-repair/ From info at sfconservancy.org Wed Dec 7 18:44:54 2022 From: info at sfconservancy.org (Software Freedom Conservancy) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2022 10:44:54 -0800 Subject: Announcing FOSSY, July 13-16 in Portland Oregon! Message-ID: Announcing FOSSY, July 13-16 in Portland Oregon! URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/dec/07/fossy-announcement/ Social Media: https://social.sfconservancy.org/notice/AQN7HDZ7O7YvZMnllg https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1600560518909288448 Software Freedom Conservancy is announcing our first ever Free and Open Source Software Yearly Conference (FOSSY)! Free and Open Source Software is back at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR for a 4 day conference July 13-16, 2023. Join us to celebrate and learn about what makes the FOSS community so special and unique and to discuss the most critical issues in our field. The conference will focus on community driven initiatives in FOSS like licensing and legal approaches, community development as well as technical talks from contributors from all over the world. The health and safety of our attendees is an utmost priority for us and we will be publishing information about our covid protocols in the coming weeks. We are seeking sponsors at various levels to help provide food, coffee and AV + WiFi services so we can ensure our conference is run completely on free software. If you or your organization would like more information here is our sponsorship prospectus [0] or you can contact us at conference at sfconservancy.org for more information. Mark your calendars for a truly free software focused conference. We can't wait to have you join us in Portland next summer for a weekend full of sharing ideas for the future, realtime development and using free software to build the world we want to live in. Please visit our landing page, FOSSY 2023 [1], for more information. [0] https://sfconservancy.org/docs/Fossy-Prospectus.pdf [1] https://fossy.us From info at sfconservancy.org Wed Dec 21 18:55:09 2022 From: info at sfconservancy.org (Software Freedom Conservancy) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 13:55:09 -0500 Subject: Conservancy submits comments to FTC for free software labeling Message-ID: Conservancy submits comments to FTC for free software labeling If accepted, appliances would include offer for source on EnergyGuide label URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/dec/21/ftc-comments-free-software-labeling/ Social Media: https://social.sfconservancy.org/notice/AQq9am4UqaEoB1uOLQ https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1605636752101736450?s=20&t=2oq_eDYpatejUnsRYevb0Q As one of his first official acts as Director of Compliance, Denver Gingerich submitted a comment to the FTC on behalf of SFC proposing adding software Right to Repair instructions for copyleft software on appliances. In conversations with various Right to Repair organizations, we brainstormed how to submit to the new FTC request for comment for the EnergyGuide labeling system. Based on these discussions, we found that there is no organization or governing body requiring repair instruction labeling for software. Given how many modern electronics and appliances rely on copylefted free software, SFC recommended adding software repair instructions that include labeling that there is copyleft software on the device and including specific links to the source code and repair instructions on the manufacturer's website. These are already required by the license, but are often buried deep in a manual somewhere. Adding these instructions would extend the rights afforded by copyleft software to all users of hardware that rely on it. The FTC's EnergyGuide labeling system started out as a way to provide transparency in energy usage (and cost) to give consumers a better picture of what was entailed in the lifetime of the product. Over the years it has become a more holistic guide on the complete lifecycle of production, use and disposal of our appliances. SFC believes that the right to repair must be part of this holistic view. Free and open source software provides longevity for products that are either deemed too old for manufacturers to support, or want to force you into buying new ones so they can perpetuate their 'planned obsolescence'. SFC believes that FOSS is a critical component to achieving all the goals of the Right to Repair movement. Joining together with the Right to Repair groups has opened up SFC to myriad new ways to provide advocacy for software freedom. SFC is grateful to the Right to Repair movement for the inclusion of software related concerns, and expects these budding relationships to grow into further fruitful cooperation to support users of all kinds of devices. You can read our comment directly here [0] or submit your own at the FTC website [1]. For more details on SFC's submission, see our blog post [2] on our comment to the FTC. [0] https://downloads.regulations.gov/FTC-2022-0061-0018/attachment_1.pdf [1] https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FTC-2022-0061-0002 [2] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/dec/21/energyguide-software-repair-label/