The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is a nonprofit that provides fiscal sponsorship for FOSS projects and is the primary organization enforcing copyleft license compliance — continuing the enforcement work the free-software-foundation pioneered but at greater scale and with more projects.
The SFC was established in 2006 to address a gap: many FOSS projects needed legal entity status (to receive donations, hold trademarks, sign contracts) but were too small to justify founding independent nonprofits. The SFC provides member projects with fiscal sponsorship — it acts as the legal entity, handles finances, and provides organizational infrastructure. Member projects have included Git, Inkscape, BusyBox, QEMU, Samba, Wine, and many others.
Bradley Kuhn, a GPL enforcement advocate who had previously worked at the free-software-foundation, became the SFC's first executive director in 2010. Karen Sandler joined as executive director in 2014, bringing experience from the GNOME Foundation and a focus on medical device software freedom. Sandler has been particularly prominent on copyleft enforcement and the rights of users of GPL-covered software in embedded systems.
GPL enforcement is the SFC's most publicly visible activity. The SFC pursues enforcement primarily through negotiation, seeking compliance (making source code available as the license requires) rather than damages. Major enforcement actions have targeted consumer electronics manufacturers shipping Linux-based products without complying with gpl-v2 source release requirements.
The SFC's "Give Up GitHub" campaign (launched 2022) called on FOSS projects to leave github-platform in protest of GitHub Copilot — an AI code completion tool trained on public repositories including GPL-licensed code, which the SFC and others argued violated the terms of copyleft licenses. The campaign had limited uptake but raised important questions about the interaction between machine learning and FOSS licensing that remain unresolved in the modern-foss-and-sustainability-crisis-2015-present era.
The SFC occupies the free-software end of the software-freedom-vs-open-source spectrum, emphasizing copyleft and user freedom over pragmatic corporate adoption, while working more collaboratively with the ecosystem than the FSF's sometimes confrontational style.