The Board of Directors of the Conservancy elects its officers. The current officers are:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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