The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 that provides a fiscal and organizational home for free software projects and conducts GPL enforcement. bradley-kuhn, a protégé of stallman and former FSF executive director, is its president.
The SFC was established to fill a gap in the free software movement's infrastructure: a neutral home for projects that need legal and financial infrastructure but are not large enough to incorporate independently. Member projects include BusyBox, Git, Inkscape, Samba, and many others.
The SFC's GPL enforcement program has pursued some of the most significant gpl-copyleft-mechanism enforcement actions, particularly around gpl-v2 compliance in consumer electronics. These cases address tivoization in practice — companies distributing Linux-based devices without providing the source code required by the GPL.
The SFC maintains the free-software-definition standard in its enforcement work, insisting on the four-freedoms rather than the weaker "open source" framing of the open-source-initiative. Kuhn's consistent alignment with stallman's framework distinguishes the SFC from organizations that accept OSI-approved but non-copyleft licenses.
The SFC and the software-freedom-law-center founded by eben-moglen represent complementary institutions in the free software legal ecosystem, both operating within the framework that Stallman established with the gnu-project and the free-software-foundation.