2.8 KiB
Legal
When in doubt, write to us
For legal purposes, your project is now part of Conservancy. Anytime you encounter a large block of legal sounding text from a company, event or organization, please send it to us. If you are about to fill out a grant application or sign something as part of an application for funding or in-kind support, please write to us first. If you have licensing questions, want help with your trademark or anything comes up where the idea of suing starts being discussed, please get in touch with us before deciding anything.
Trademarks & Licensing
Conservancy can help you register and then defend your trademark. It costs a little bit of money depending on how many marks and jurisdictions you want to register, but our lawyer can help you make a good choice. We can also work with you on changing or applying a software license to your work and will read and help you sort though any contract that comes up. Write to us though your PLC alias and we’ll get you to the correct person.
Contracts, EULA's, Terms of Service
As your fiscal home, Conservancy needs to be able to sort though these agreements for you since we are legally responsible for your project. This includes User Agreements, Grant Applications, anything that asks for your taxpayer ID number or has lots of legal verbiage that they want your consent to before giving you access to a service. These conversations typically happen in our ticketing system using legal@tix.sfconservancy.org, but you should write to your PLC alias first to make sure we get your matter assigned to the right person.
Avoiding Conflicts of Interest
Our non-profit status requires that all paid project work is done in the public interest and not for the benefit of a single corporate entity. This means that we must watch out for conflicts of interest, or places where money might get spent in a way that does not serve the project's public interest goals. Conservancy is ultimately responsible for maintaining our non-profit status for the benefit of all our projects so we often ask questions to make each project avoids the kinds of activities that could jeopardize that status. A few examples:
Funding Discussions
Discussions around grants that up up being "How can we pay Shelly?" instead of "What is the most important work on our roadmap and who is the best person to do that work?"
Contract Work
Contract work that is being funded by a company that does not want the work added to the mainstream codebase or wants it under a proprietary license
PLC Composition Changes
Too many people on your PLC becoming financially dependent on a single company, either as employees or contractors
If you think you are approaching any one of these situations, please let us know so we can help you figure out how to proceed.