Free project hosting service, Sourceware, has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) to benefit from the organisation’s legal protection of free projects. The SFC provides protection for projects that need to comply with the GPL license, and accumulates sponsorship for hosting services. Participants are allowed to concentrate on the development process while the SFC collects donations, owns project assets, and saves developers from personal liability in the event of a trial. For donations, the SFC allows tax deductions since it falls into the preferential category of taxation.
Projects that are being developed with support from the SFC include Git, Wine, Samba, Qemu, Openwrt, Coreboot, Mercarial, Boost, Openchaange, Busybox, Godot, Inkscape, UCLIBC, Homebrew, and about a dozen other free projects.
Sourceware has been providing open projects with a hosting area and related services since 1998. These services include maintenance of mailing lists, placement of GIT-reasonitions, monitoring of errors (BUGZILLA), patching patches (Patchwork), testing of assemblies (Buildbot), and the distribution of releases. The Sourceware infrastructure is used to spread and develop projects such as GCC, Glibc, GDB, Binutils, Cygwin, LVM2, ELFUTILS, BZIP2, SYSTEE MTAP, and Valgrind.
Sourceware joining SFC is expected to interest new volunteers to work on hosting and attract funds for the modernisation and development of the infrastructure. A managing committee consisting of seven representatives has been formed to interact with SFC in Sourceware. To exclude conflicts of interest in the committee, more than two participants associated with one company or organisation may not be present. Earlier, Red Hat employees made the major contribution to Sourceware and provided equipment for the project, which prevented attracting other sponsors and provoked disputes about excessive dependence on one company.
SFC Takes Over Hosting of Free Projects Sourceware
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