New Conservancy Offers Gratis Services to FOSS 30
Anonymous Coward writes "Yahoo! News is reporting on the launch of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The new organization, started by Bradley Kuhn, Eben Moglen, and Daniel Ravicher, will serve to provide member projects with free financial management and administrative services. The new group was established by the Software Freedom Law Center, which was started by Moglen and Ravicher one year ago."
Did I miss something? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:1, Informative)
Its required some project are doing over $100 000 (Score:1, Insightful)
Donations can be a pain a times you have to keep books for the tax man.
Not all Open Source projects don't have cash making arms. Ie paid support you get to the top of the email list.
Closed minded people thinking that Closed Source is the only thing that makes money.
Re:How many... (Score:1, Troll)
Meh. Troll.
The FSF does nothing but good - I'm willing to bet most of the work done by attorneys for this Conservancy will be pro-bono.
I bet you're just a conservative annoyed by them calling it a 'Conservancy'
Re:How many... (Score:2)
But that's not the issue I'm speaking to.
Rather, it is that the "legalists" have wormed their way so deeply into our social fabric that the fabric has begun to rot and fray.
Whenever I see something like "so-and-so has established a financial services foundation to help kumquat growers," my immediate reaction is "lawyers have just created another source of lucre that allows them to profit by doing essentially nothing but 'prot
let the coding commence! (Score:1)
Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Wine involvement (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=310#Software%20Freed
Hope it works out (Score:4, Informative)
Sizable organizations can generally bite the bullet and get it done, but this might be a real help to some smaller projects, or those just getting started.
Huh? (Score:1)
So why now the turnabout? Why are key members of the FSF now impliying that Free Software needs to be a charity case?
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google
that you can sell Free Software
I'm not sure they ever made that claim. That you are allowed to, yes, That you can serives on top, yes. That it will be easy licensing the free software itself for a fee, no.
Anyway, I'll say "RedHat".
and that you can make a living writing Free Software
Countless people
So why now the turnabout? Why are key members of the FSF now impliying that Free Software needs to be a charity case
Ther is no turnabout. For a variety of reasons, not
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
The corporate funding is an investment. The investors expect the projects to be financially successful. Few of them are, which is why these sorts of investments are risky, and why it's so hard to prove yourself worthy of the funding. But the bottom line is that the funds will eventually get reimbursed.
But that i
Stop being a twat (Score:2)
The FSF have never said that commercial Free Software is the only way to go, merely the Free Software is not counter to commercial development. Free software has been developed commercially. Free software has been developed non commercially. This conservancy doesn't change that, it merely aims to help service one part of a very broad Free Software church.
Re:Stop being a twat (Score:1, Flamebait)
Church? Church! Methinks you're taking this WAY too seriously.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Nobody in the FSF ever said that it is simple to make money off free software, and they are very aware of the fact that the environment is in many parts still hostile. In the conservancy's case, I guess it's about helping free software grow despite this hostility. You only see it as a charity because it's free software and you are predisposed to see it tha
International ? (Score:1, Insightful)
as FOSS is a worldwide movement will they be offering these services globally ? or is this another US only club ?
Frther Notes at Groklaw (Score:2)
Having dedicated (para)legal and accounting types to handle the administrivia of maintaining Non Profit (Charitable) status, could be a godsend for the projects that manage to get in on this opportunity.
Alternative (Score:2)
Just teasing. I know that's not what's going on here. But hopefully people will check the fine print just in case.
It would be nice if it worked... (Score:2, Insightful)
Great (Score:1, Offtopic)
Yahoo! News reporting it? No. (Score:2)
No it isn't, the link goes to a PR Newswire page, which is an automatic feed that is carried by Yahoo!. In this case, all we can say is that Yahoo is redistributing an article that was written, published and paid for by the Software Freedom Conservancy on the their own launch.
In case you don't understand the significance of this, the way it was originally written implies that Yahoo! believes this to be significant enough to report on