The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization which provides two useful services.

Firstly, they provide “fiscal sponsor” services for free software projects which wish to benefit from being a non-profit but which do not have the resources to set up their own Foundation. They have over 35 member projects which they support. If you use WINE, Samba, Mercurial, Inkscape, Git or any of the others, you can thank and support those projects by supporting SFC.

Secondly, if you believe that copyleft has a role (and it doesn’t even have to be an exclusive role) to play in the free software licensing ecosystem, you have an interest in making sure that copyleft licenses do not de facto become the same as permissive ones. That requires working with companies to help them understand their quid pro quo obligations to share and, rarely, taking them to court when flagrant violations are not corrected after significant time. The SFC is basically the only organization which does this valuable work, and that fact makes companies (sadly) less likely to support it.

This means that SFC greatly relies on support from individuals. I have just re-committed as a supporter for 2017 and I hope many of my readers will do the same.