Like many non-profits, Conservancy is directed by a self-perpetuating Board of Directors, who appoint Officers 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.
Peter Brown has worked in non-profit management and finance for more than twenty years. He served as the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation from 2005 until 2011, and previously as its Financial Controller and GPL Compliance Lab Manager. Peter has also been a Director of New Internationalist Publications Cooperative, and worked in London for BBC Network Radio.
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.
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.
Mike Linksvayer serves on the boards of AcaWiki and OpenHatch, and is chair of the Open Definition Advisory Council. From 2003 to 2012 he served as CTO and VP of Creative Commons, where he is now a Senior Fellow. In 2000 he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data mass collaboration platform.
Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 15 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 works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert. In this role, he facilitates open source activities both internally within HP as well as externally within the broader open source community. 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.
Stormy Peters is Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla. She is passionate about open source software and educates companies and communities on how open source software is changing the software industry. She is a compelling speaker who engages her audiences during and after her presentations and frequently speaks on business aspects of open source software. In addition to Mozilla, Stormy is an advisor for HFOSS, IntraHealth Open and Open Source for America, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries. Stormy joined Mozilla from the GNOME Foundation where she served as executive director. Previously, she worked at OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community. Stormy graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.
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