CONSERVANCY - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Evaluation Committee
• Technologist
• Contributor to the Free Software

Bdale Garbee is a technologist and community builder. He has deep connections to free and open source software communities, having been an early participant in the Debian community and board member of Software in the Public Interest for a decade. He also has substantial coporate experience in the field, and has recently retired (for the second time) from an impressive career at HP/HPE. Garbee also serves on the boards of the Freedombox Foundation and Aleph Objects. He is a co-founder of Altus Metrum, LLC, is a small business that designs, builds, and sells completely open hardware and open source avionics solutions for use in high power model rockets. Garbee is a frequent speaker and presence at free and open source software events. Bdale Garbee has been a contributor to the Free Software community since 1979. Bdale's background also includes many years of hardware design, Unix internals, and embedded systems work. He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures, served as Debian Project Leader, then chairman of the Debian Technical Committee for nearly a decade, and remains active in the Debian community. Bdale served as an HP Fellow in the Office of the CTO until 2016 where he led HP's open source strategy work. Bdale served as President of Software in the Public Interest for a decade. He served nearly as long on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation representing individual affiliates and the developer community. Bdale currently serves on the boards of the Freedombox Foundation, Linux Professional Institute, and Aleph Objects.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Evaluation Committee
• Policy Fellow and Hacker - in - Residence
• the Policy Fellow

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. 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. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy's primary volunteer 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 Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Job Titles:

• Community Organizer & Non - Profit Problem Solver

Pono joined Conservancy to help fill a community need for bridging technical and non-technical roles. Having worked at FOSS foundations and organizations for over a decade, his background in FOSS infrastructure led him to think more deeply about how to better use community intelligence instead of technology to solve governance questions. He is passionate about making FOSS a more equitable and inclusive space. With a background in mathematics and physics, he looks forward to mobilizing social intelligence and community goveranance as a basis for solving both technical and non-technical problems.

Job Titles:

• Director of Compliance

Denver manages SFC's license compliance work, including its technical parts (such as triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding source) as well as planning and carrying out our enforcement strategy (with advice and input from SFC's Executive Director and Policy Fellow). Outside of SFC, Denver also co-runs a FOSS business. Previously, Denver authored financial trading software on Linux. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as LinuxCon North America, Texas Linux Fest, LibrePlanet, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, CopyleftConf, and the Open Video Conference.

Job Titles:

• Chairman of the Board
• Director

Over the course of multiple decades as a free software developer, Allison has worked in a wide variety of projects and domains, from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, shipping fulfillment, and talking smart-home appliances, to programming language design, compilers, hypervisors, containers, deployment automation, database replication, operating systems and kernels, and hardware architectures and microarchitectures. She is a board member at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, vice chair of the Microarchitecture Side Channels (Security) SIG at RISC-V International, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for free software community leaders. At various points in the past she has served as chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chair of the board at the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O'Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at HP, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and RISC-V projects, and currently works on free software and open hardware at Rivos.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford

Dr. Laura Fortunato is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she researches the evolution of human social and cultural behavior, working at the interface of anthropology and biology. An advocate of reproducible computational methods in research, including the use of Free/Open-Source tools, she founded the Reproducible Research Oxford project, with the aim to foster a culture of reproducibility and open research at Oxford. Laura holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Padova and masters and PhD in Anthropology from University College London. Before joining Oxford she was an Omidyar fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is currently an External Professor and a member of the Science Steering Committee. She is also a member of the steering group of the UK Reproducibility Network, a peer-led consortium that aims to promote robust research practice in the UK.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Evaluation Committee

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.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Evaluation Committee

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially. He works for CIQ as a Distinguished Engineer, working on Open Source code.

Job Titles:

• Attorney
• Executive Director
• Member of the Evaluation Committee

Karen M. Sandler is an attorney and the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology. As a patient deeply concerned with the technology in her own body, Karen is known as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software as a life-or-death issue, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. She co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for people who face under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in tech. She is an adjunct Lecturer-In-Law of Columbia Law School and a visiting scholar at University of California Santa Cruz. Prior to joining Software Freedom Conservancy, Karen was the executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was the general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. She began her career as a lawyer at Clifford Chance and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. She also holds a bachelor of science in engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Sandler has won awards for her work on behalf of software freedom, including the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2011. She received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in 2023. 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.

Job Titles:

• Systems Administrator

Paul has been using Linux and FOSS for over 26 years and working as a sysadmin for over 20 years. Having fallen in love with computers at a young age, he found it intellectually intersting and found the FOSS world an incredible and natural place to learn. He brings a passion for how free and open source software can make our society a much more equitable place, and work for us rather than against us.

Job Titles:

• General Counsel

Rick Sanders, has over 20 years' experience as a intellectual-property litigator. He started his legal career at Fenwick & West's Silicon Valley office, then moved to Nashville to join Waller, before co-founding Aaron & Sanders, with the goal of providing sophisticated legal services to technology clients in Middle Tennessee. Rick also taught copyright law at Vanderbilt University School of Law, and he co-produced The Copyright Office Comes to Music City for many years. He is also a past chair of the American Bar Association's Trademarks and the Internet committee, and the Nashville Bar Association's Intellectual Property Section. He is admitted to the bar of the States of California and Tennessee, as well as the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and all U.S. District Courts in California and Tennessee. Before becoming a lawyer, Rick was a college instructor in English composition and literature, especially Shakespeare. He is a native of Mountain View, California and now lives in Nashville.

Job Titles:

• Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the Software Freedom

Sage Sharp is the Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the Software Freedom Conservancy. Sage runs Outreachy, which is Conservancy's diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people who are subject to systemic bias or impacted by underrepresentation in tech. Sage is a long-standing free software contributor, and is known for their work as a Linux kernel maintainer for seven years. They also founded their own company, Otter Tech, which has trained over 400 people on how to enforce a Code of Conduct.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Evaluation Committee

Tom Callaway has been working for Red Hat since 2001. He started in Sales Engineering and has been the Fedora Engineering Manager since 2008. He served three consecutive elected terms on the Fedora Board from 2007 to 2011. Tom also maintains or co-maintains a large number of Packages in Fedora (currently 390) and is leading the Fedora Packaging Committee, responsible for RPM Packaging Standards and Practices. Additionally, he is responsible for managing Fedora's Legal issues. Tom frequently represents Fedora and Free Software at conferences around the world, and tries his best not to make too big of a fool of himself. When not working, Tom enjoys geocaching, ice hockey, gaming, science fiction, and pinball.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Evaluation Committee

Tom Marble is best known for being the first "OpenJDK Ambassador" on the Sun Microsystems core team that open sourced the Java programming language. He continues to apply his community experiences in open source projects and his interest in intellectual property by co-organizing the legal and policy issues track at Europe's largest open source conference, FOSDEM. Marble is committed to increasing diversity in technology by volunteering as an organizer for ClojureBridge, a weekend workshop for women to learn the Clojure programming language, as well as Debian's participation in Outreachy. He is the founder of Informatique, Inc., a consultancy which leverages his hardware, software and legal engineering background for client projects as diverse as telematics for electric vehicles, probabilistic model checking, autonomous cyber defense, and multiplayer online gaming.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Deputy General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation

Tony currently serves as the Deputy General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, where he manages the day-to-day operations of Wikimedia's legal department, and provide specific expertise on free and open source licensing, intellectual property, non-profit law, and privacy matters. Tony is also an organizer of Conservancy's Outreachy project, which provides paid internships in free and open source for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Prior to joining Wikimedia, Tony served as General Counsel (and "Employee #2") of Software Freedom Conservancy for over six years. Tony has also spent time in the private sector with PCT Law Group and Kenyon & Kenyon, and as an intellectual property licensing and business development professional with IBM. Tony received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2017. Tony is an active participant in and supporter of the non-profit community, and lives in the Bay Area with his family.

Job Titles:

• Operations Manager

Tracy acts as Operations Manager at Software Freedom Conservancy. Bringing her super-skills of organization and love of bureaucracy, she helps things run at SFC smoothly behind the scenes. Tracy also serves on the board of her local hackerspace, an organization committed to teaching and promoting open technology exclusively. She feels that open techonology allows people to express their creativity regardless of their financial situation or technical background. Tracy is currently persuing a degree in GIS from the University of Tennessee.