New Conservancy Offers Gratis Services to FOSS

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."

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this could be of some use to projects like OpenBSD that are not in a position to create their own not for profit entities.

International ?

[Anonymous Coward]

as FOSS is a worldwide movement will they be offering these services globally ? or is this another US only club ?

Re:Huh?

[Knuckles]

Free Software is not hostile to commerce

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 all free software projects can get the necessary funding, especially in the beginning- in fact, most can not. This as such does not make them any less viable or at least desireable from a user's point of view, and if you want to see a flourishing free software ecosystem.

Just like the fact (in and of itself) that many proprietary software companies/projects do not make money for a long time and depend on corporate funding does not make these projects any more viable.

It would be nice if it worked...

[Unequivocal]

I tried to use the Free legal resources touted last year by these guys. I called up and some harried guy answered the phone (presumably Moglen) and he said he'd have to call me back. I left my number and never heard from them again. It was so disorderly as to be amusing. But it was not effective OSS legal advice for the little guy, by any stretch. Maybe they'll get it right on this one, or eventually..

Its required some project are doing over $100 000

[Anonymous Coward]

A month.

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.