Can LibreHealth support SFC in its dispute with SFLC

Hi,

LibreHealth is currently a member project of SFC, the Software Freedom Conservancy. Thus, SFC provides your project with legal advice and administrative support.

The Software Freedom Law Center, once the parent of SFC, has filed with the USPTO to cancel the trademark on SFC’s name, a bizzare thing for one organization which is purportedly supposed to support the Free Software community to do to another.

You can read about the dispute here: https://lwn.net/Articles/738279/

It seems to me that SFC member projects should create a public message in support of SFC. Thus, I am approaching LibreHealth as a large, reputable member project. I am not personally a member project (although I have contributed to several) but I would certainly like to help create such a thing and would sign onto it as an individual. My experience is that SFC has always conducted its business ethically, as have its staff.

Thanks

Bruce Perens
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Sorry to hear that they are running afoul of Moglen’s little banana republic. We have our own experience with folks like that.

My impression was that SFLC does little, and that the SFC was created pretty much as a breakaway project, not a “child” so much as an unwanted bastard. The mistake of the SFC was to attempt to use help from SFLC there at the beginning. Now they have rationalization that let’s them mask their evil controlling urges.

Thanks @BrucePerens for reaching out on this topic, as well as for your leadership in Open Source over the years. (We in fact just watched “Revolution OS” this past weekend!)

Do you (or others) have any opinions, as to whether there is more power in having multiple letters from various projects, vs. a single common letter of support signed on by both Conservancy member projects as well as supporters, and general public?

Look forward to continue this conversation and understanding how we can best be supportive.

I think they meant for the pieces to stay together, but they were optimistic about receiving support from their corporate partners once they started suing other corporations who violated the license on their software.

I have no idea how your project would decide to write a supporting letter or not. Can you do that?

Michael, I think a common letter would be best. And I suspect that there might be a common channel for SFC member organizations that I am not subscribed to. So, it would be nice if you or another member organization took this issue there.

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I’ll attempt to bring this up in our LibreHealth Steering Committee meeting later tonight.

If you’re an IRC user, I’d also encourage you to join the #conservancy channel on Freenode - irc://chat.freenode.net/conservancy - where quite a few of the member project … er, members, hang out.

On irc://chat.freenode.net/conservancy, I immediately heard from Shane Curcuru, who is an Apache developer, but not any member projects :slight_smile:

Ahh, the joys of IRC! :wink: hopefully folks will catch up when they’re no longer AFK…