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Software Freedom Conservancy is a nonprofit organization centered around ethical technology. Our mission is to ensure the right to repair, improve and reinstall software. We promote and defend these rights through fostering free and open source software (FOSS) projects, driving initiatives that actively make technology more inclusive, and advancing policy strategies that defend FOSS (such as copyleft). Learn more.

Copilot and Principles

In the ongoing class action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, we continue to call on the plaintiffs to prioritize copyleft compliance above financial compensation.

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Term of the week

proprietary relicensing

Proprietary relicensing is a toxic business model whereby a company distributes software under a copyleft licenses, but refuses to agree to the copyleft license themselves (by collecting rights to issue proprietary, non-FOSS licenses for the software separately). While the software is technically available as FOSS, users must worry since the rights-holder usually captiously (and often incorrectly) interprets the copyleft license and demands licensing fees for acts that copyleft actually permits. Users must chose whether to fight the proprietary relicensor in Court, buy a proprietary license, or cease use of the software. This behavior is widely consider by FOSS activists as an inappropriate use of copyleft licensing.

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