Donate to Conservancy Before End of 2019!

Yesterday, I sent out a version of this blog post to Conservancy's donors as a fundraising email. As most people reading this already know, I work (remotely from the west coast) for a 501(c)(3) charity based in NY called Software Freedom Conservancy, which is funded primarily from individuals like you who donate $120/year (or more :). My primary job and career since 1997 has been working for various charities, mostly related to the general cause of software freedom.

More generally, I have dedicated myself since the late 1990s to software freedom activism. Looking back across these two decades, I believe our movement, focused on software users' rights, faces the most difficult challenges yet. In particular, I believe 2019 was the most challenging year in our community's history.

Our movement had early success. Most of our primary software development tools remain (for the moment) mostly Free Software. Rarely do new developers face the kinds of challenges that proprietary software originally brought us. In the world today that seemingly embraces Open Source, the problems are more subtle and complex than they once were. Conservancy dedicates its work to addressing those enigmatic problems. That’s why I work here, why I’m glad to support the organization myself, and why I ask you to support it as well.

Early success was easy for software freedom because the technology industry ignored us at first. Copyleft was initially a successful antidote to the very first Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) — separating the binaries from source code and using copyright restrictions to forbid sharing. When companies attacked software freedom and copyleft in the early 2000s, we were lucky that those attacks backfired. However, today, we must solve the enigma that the technology industry seems to embrace software freedom, but only to a point. Most for-profit companies today ask a key question constantly: “what Open Source technologies can we leverage while keeping an unfair proprietary edge?”. FOSS is accepted in the enterprise but only if it allows companies to proprietarize, particularly in areas that specifically threaten user privacy and autonomy.

However, I and my colleagues at Conservancy are realists. We know that a charity like us won't ever have the resources to face well-funded companies on their own playing field, and we’d be fools to try. So, we do what Free Software has always done best: we pick work with the greatest potential to maximize software freedom for as many users as we can.

At Conservancy's founding, Conservancy focused exclusively on providing a charitable home to FOSS projects, so they could focus on software freedom for their users. Through Conservancy, projects make software freedom the project’s top priority rather than an afterthought. In this new environment where (seemingly) every company and trade association has set up a system for organizational homes for projects, Conservancy focuses on projects that make a big impact for the software freedom of individual users.

Today, Conservancy does much more beyond those basics. Given my early introduction to licensing, I learned early and often that copyleft — our community's primary tool and strategy to assure companies and individuals would always remain equals — was and would always be constantly under attack. I've thus been glad to help Conservancy publish and speak regularly about essential copyleft and FOSS policy. (And, I'm personally working right now on even more writing on the subject of copyleft policy.) I'm particularly proud of Conservan