February 7, 2008
Bongo and Twisted Join the Software Freedom Conservancy
Non-Profit FOSS Organization Expands Its Project Membership
The Software Freedom Conservancy, home of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, today announced that it welcomes as its newest two members, the Bongo and Twisted projects, and now includes thirteen projects.
By joining the Conservancy, Bongo and Twisted are entitled the benefits of non-profit incorporation. The Conservancy provides administrative and organizational services so that the developers can focus on the software, and still receive the benefits of 501(c)(3) non-profit corporate existence, such as charitable donations.
Founded in March 2006, the Conservancy allows developers of its member FOSS projects to unite under a common organization which provides much-needed administrative services to them. This structure spares each software project the burden of starting and maintaining its own independent non-profit organization.
The Conservancy now welcomes Bongo and Twisted. They show the excellent diversity of useful software available in the FOSS world. The Bongo Project project is building a useful mail, calendaring and contacts system on top of a standards-based server stack and is licensed primarily under the GPLv2. Twisted is an event-driven networking engine written in Python and licensed under the MIT license (sometimes called the 1-clause BSD license).
“Bongo and Twisted are exactly the sorts of projects the Conservancy seeks to serve — vibrant development projects led by dedicated developers who wish to collect earmarked donations and receive the benefits of the administrative services that only a non-profit structure can provide”, said Bradley M. Kuhn, president of the Conservancy. “I am proud that the Conservancy is available to provide these sorts of services so that developers can keep generating the excellent code for the next generation of FOSS applications and tools.”
The Conservancy now boasts thirteen member projects. It is led by its board of directors, a who's who of both old guard FOSS developers and FOSS non-profit leaders.