Directors
Like many non-profits, Conservancy is directed by a self-perpetuating Board of Directors, who appoint the Executive Director and staff to carry out the day-to-day operations of the organization. The Directorship of the Conservancy includes both talented non-profit managers and experienced FLOSS project leaders who can both guide the administrative operations of the organization as well as mentor member project leaders as needed. Our Directors constantly search for additional directors who can contribute a variety of expertise and perspective related to the Conservancy's mission.
Currently, the directors of Conservancy are:Jeremy Allison
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.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 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.
Dr. Mark Galassi
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.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.Bradley M. Kuhn
is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of . 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 , launched , and invented the . 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 , and an M.S. in Computer Science from the . discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the , in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has and co-hosts the audcast, .