Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of Conservancy. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. In partnership with the GNOME Foundation, Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women. Prior to taking up this position, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.
Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various FLOSS projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. From 2005-2010, Kuhn worked as the Policy Analyst and Technology Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn was the primary volunteer for Conservancy from 2006–2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of FLOSS programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing.
Tony Sebro is a seasoned technology attorney with a broad base of business and legal experience relating to technology, strategy, and business development. Before joining Conservancy, Tony was most recently a Partner with the PCT Companies, a family of professional service firms. Prior to that, he was Program Director, Technology & Intellectual Property at IBM's Armonk, New York world headquarters, where he was responsible for developing and executing licensing strategies in partnership with IBM's Software Group. In that role, Tony led negotiations and structured deals with market leaders in the web technology, e-commerce, retail, enterprise software, and financial services sectors. Tony also led various internal strategic initiatives, including an effort to provide business leaders of key emerging market opportunities with coordinated intellectual property development and monetization strategies, as well as the revamping and supervision of IBM's corporate-wide process for determining the value and availability of patents for sale. Prior to his tenure at IBM, Mr. Sebro practiced law in the New York office of Kenyon & Kenyon, LLP, handling litigation and licensing matters for clients in the medical, pharmaceutical and mechanical technology areas. Tony received his J.D. and his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tony is a member of the New York bar and registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Tony is also an active participant in and supporter of the non-profit community, and has served on the boards of multiple non-profit organizations.
Brett Smith began his FLOSS advocacy in 2000 at college, organizing student groups and discussing the issues with professors and journalists. He also spent a couple of those summers interning at the Free Software Foundation, and working in various assisting roles there when he returned to campus. Later on he worked as the FSF's License Compliance Engineer from 2006-2012, helping to shepherd the GPLv3 drafting process and do outreach after the license was released. From there, he worked as a Systems Engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and an Arvados maintainer at Curoverse before joining Conservancy as Director of Strategic Initiatives in 2016. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.
Denver works part-time managing the technical side of Conservancy's license compliance work, triaging new reports and verifying complete and corresponding source (C&CS). His roles elsewhere have recently included financial trading software development on GNU/Linux and previously involved writing system software for hardware companies, including driver writing for the kernel named Linux at ATI (now AMD) and Qualcomm. He founded a company that designs and builds magnetic stripe readers for security hobbyists where he designed the hardware and developed the device's tools and firmware, which are both free software. Denver also writes free software in his spare time, with patches accepted into Wine, the kernel named Linux, and GNU wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and protecting the free software ecosystem, having spoken at conferences such as CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, and the Open Video Conference.
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