Like many non-profits, Conservancy is directed by a self-perpetuating Board of Directors, who appoint the Executive Director and staff to carry out the day-to-day operations of the organization. The Directorship of the Conservancy includes both talented non-profit managers and experienced FLOSS project leaders who can both guide the administrative operations of the organization as well as mentor member project leaders as needed. Our Directors constantly search for additional directors who can contribute a variety of expertise and perspective related to the Conservancy's mission.
Currently, the directors of Conservancy are:
Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.
He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.
Kate Chapman is Chief Technology Officer of the Cadasta Foundation, leading the organization’s technology team and strategy. Cadasta develops free and open source software to help communities document their land rights around the world. Chapman is recognized as a leader in the domains of open source geospatial technology and community mapping, and an advocate for open imagery as a public good. Over the past 15 years she’s worked on geospatial problems of all kinds, including tracking malaria outbreaks, mapping private residences for emergency response, and even analyzing imaginary items used in geospatial games. Chapman co-founded the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and served as the organization’s first Executive Director. She currently serves as the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
Dr. Laura Fortunato is associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she researches the evolution of human social and cultural behavior, working at the interface of anthropology and biology. An advocate of reproducible computational methods in research, including the use of Free/Open-Source tools, she founded the Reproducible Research Oxford project, with the aim to foster a culture of reproducibility and open research at Oxford.
Laura holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Padova and masters and PhD in Anthropology from University College London. Before joining Oxford she was an Omidyar fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is currently an External Professor and a member of the Science Steering Committee. She is also a member of the steering group of the UK Reproducibility Network, a peer-led consortium that aims to promote robust research practice in the UK.
Mark Galassi has been involved in the GNU project since 1984. He currently works as a researcher in the International, Space, and Response division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he has worked on the HETE-2 satellite, ISIS/Genie, the Raptor telescope, the Swift satellite, and the muon tomography project. In 1997 Mark took a couple of years off from Los Alamos (where he was previously in the ISR division and the Theoretical Astrophysics group) to work for Cygnus (now a part of Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos, although he continued working on the HETE-2 satellite (an astrophysical Gamma Ray Burst mission) part time. Mark earned his BA in Physics at Reed College and a PhD from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook.
Bdale Garbee has been a contributor to the Free Software community since 1979. Bdale's background also includes many years of hardware design, Unix internals, and embedded systems work. He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures, served as Debian Project Leader, then chairman of the Debian Technical Committee for nearly a decade, and remains active in the Debian community.
Bdale served as an HP Fellow in the Office of the CTO until 2016 where he led HP's open source strategy work. Bdale served as President of Software in the Public Interest for a decade. He served nearly as long on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation representing individual affiliates and the developer community. Bdale currently serves on the boards of the Freedombox Foundation, Linux Professional Institute, and Aleph Objects.
Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. 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. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy's primary volunteer 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 Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.
Mike Linksvayer serves on the boards of AcaWiki and OpenHatch, and on the Open Definition Advisory Council, and is Policy Director at GitHub. Previously Mike was CTO, VP, and a Senior Fellow at Creative Commons, and a co-founder of Bitzi, an early open content/open data mass collaboration platform.
Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for over 20 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years, served on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for six years and currently serves on the board of Software Freedom Conservancy. Martin earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge and he received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2013 for his contributions to the open source community.
Over the course of multiple decades as a free software developer, Allison has worked in a wide variety of projects and domains, from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, shipping fulfillment, and talking smart-home appliances, to programming language design, compilers, hypervisors, containers, deployment automation, database replication, and operating systems.
She is a board member at the Perl Foundation, a board member at the OpenStack Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for free software community leaders. At various points in the past she has served as president of the Open Source Initiative, president of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at HP, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian project, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.
Tony currently serves as the Deputy General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, where he manages the day-to-day operations of Wikimedia's legal department, and provide specific expertise on free and open source licensing, intellectual property, non-profit law, and privacy matters. Tony is also an organizer of Conservancy's Outreachy project, which provides paid internships in free and open source for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Prior to joining Wikimedia, Tony served as General Counsel (and “Employee #2”) of Software Freedom Conservancy for over six years. Tony has also spent time in the private sector with PCT Law Group and Kenyon & Kenyon, and as an intellectual property licensing and business development professional with IBM. Tony received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2017. Tony is an active participant in and supporter of the non-profit community, and lives in the Bay Area with his family.
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