Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/02/13/conservancy.html

There are a lot of problems in our society, and particularly in the USA,
right now, and plenty of charities who need our support. The reason I
continue to focus my work on software freedom is simply because there are
so few focused on the moral and ethical issues of computing. Open Source
has reached its pinnacle as an industry fad, and with it, a watered-down
message: “having some of the source code for some of your systems
some of the time is so great, why would you need anything more?”.
Universal software freedom is
however further
from reality than it was even a few years ago. At least a few of us,
in my view, must focus on that cause.

I did not post many blog posts about this in 2016. There was a reason for
that — more than any other year, work demands at Conservancy have
been constant and unrelenting. I enjoy my work, so I don’t mind, but
blogging becomes low priority when there is a constant backlog of urgent
work to support Conservancy’s mission and our member projects. It’s not
just Conservancy’s mission, of course, it’s my personal one as well.

For our 2016 fundraiser,
I wrote last
year a blog post entitled “Do You Like What I Do For a
Living?”. Last year, so many of you responded, that it not only
made it possible for me to continue that work for one more year, but we
were able to add our colleague Brett Smith to our staff, which brought
Conservancy to four full-time staff for the first time. We added a few
member projects (and are moving that queue to add more in 2017), and sure
enough — the new work plus the backlog of work waiting for another
staffer filled Brett’s queue just like my, Karen’s and Tony’s was already
filled.

The challenge now is sustaining this staffing level. Many of you came to
our aid last year because we were on the brink of needing to reduce our
efforts (and staffing) at Conservancy. Thanks to your overwhelming
response, we not only endured, but we were able to add one additional
person. As expected, though, needs of our projects increased throughout
the year, and we again — all four of us full-time staff — must
work to our limits to meet the needs of our projects.

Charitable donations are a voluntary activity, and as such they have a
special place in our society and culture. I’ve talked a lot about how
Conservancy’s Supporters give us a mandate to carry out our work. Those of
you that chose to renew your Supporter donations or become new Supporters
enable us to focus our full-time efforts on the work of Conservancy.

On the signup and renewal
page, you can read about some of our accomplishments in the last year
(including my
recent keynote at FOSDEM, an excerpt of which is included here). Our
work does not follow fads, and it’s not particularly glamorous, so only
dedicated Supporters like you understand its value. We don’t expect to
get large grants to meet the unique needs of each of our member projects,
and we certainly don’t expect large companies to provide very much
funding unless we cede control of the organization to their requests (as
trade associations do). Even our most popular program, Outreachy, is
attacked by a small group of people who don’t want to see the status quo
of privileged male domination of Open Source and Free Software
disrupted.

Supporter contributions are what make Conservancy possible. A year ago,
you helped us build Conservancy as a donor-funded organization and
stabilize our funding base. I now must ask that you make an annual
commitment to renewal — either
by renewing your contribution
now or becoming
a monthly supporter, or, if you’re just learning about my work at
Conservancy from this blog
post, reading up
on us
and becoming a new
Supporter.

Years ago, when I was still only a part-time volunteer at Conservancy,
someone who disliked our work told me that I had “invented a job of
running Conservancy”. He meant it as an insult, but I take it as a
compliment with pride. In fact, between me and my colleague (and our
Executive Director) Karen Sandler, we’ve “invented” a total of
four full-time jobs and one part-time one to advance software freedom. You
helped us do that with your donations. If you donate again today, your
donation will be matched to make the funds go further.

Many have told me this year that they are driven to give to other
excellent charities that fight racism, work for civil and immigration
rights, and other causes that seem particularly urgent right now. As long
as there is racism, sexism, murder, starvation, and governmental oppression
in the world, I cannot argue that software freedom should be made a
priority above all of those issues. However, even if everyone in our
society focused on a single, solitary cause that we agreed was the top
priority, it’s unlikely we could make quicker progress. Meanwhile, if we
all single-mindedly ignore less urgent issues, they will, in time, become so
urgent they’ll be insurmountable by the time we focus on them.

Industrialized nations have moved almost fully to computer automation for
most every daily task. If you question this fact, try to do your job for a
day without using any software at all, or anyone using software on your
behalf, and you’ll probably find it impossible. Then, try to do your job
using only Free Software for a day, and you’ll find, as I have, that tasks
that should take only a few minutes take hours when you avoid proprietary
software, and some are just impossible. There are very few organizations
that are considering the long-term implications of this slowly growing
problem and making plans to build the foundations of a society that doesn’t
have that problem. Conservancy is one of those few, so I hope you’ll
realize that long-term value of our lifelong work to defend and expand
software freedom and donate.