Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

05 Jan 2018, 8:49 a.m.

Software Freedom Conservancy Fundraiser

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2018 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Become a Conservancy Supporter!

I am a supporter of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit that helps free and open source software projects. They help programmers give away their work for free. I wrote a quick neighbor-friendly introduction to what they do (video version) a few years ago, and everything in it still applies.

In case you don't want to watch/read that: Conservancy is a nonprofit umbrella (a fiscal sponsor), helping projects like Git, homebrew, Wine, Selenium, and others by taking care of legal and financial paperwork on their behalf. They're also the institutional home of Outreachy, which gives underindexed people in tech paid apprenticeship-style internships to help them start their open source software careers. And they make sure big companies actually follow the rules, legally, so everyone can benefit the same from the openness of open source.

Right now, they have a challenge match going: "All donations up to [USD] $75,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until January 15." And they're about $5,500 from reaching that goal -- we can push it over the top! Conservancy's part of the unsung infrastructure of inclusivity and fairness in open source and in the larger tech industry, and I hope those of you who can will chip in a bit.