Non-Profit Centers of FLOSS Development

Bradley M. Kuhn

Friday 9 March 2011

Who Am I?

A Brief Non-Profit Free Software History

Some FSF History

FSF-Employed Developers

The Rise of the Volunteers

For-Profit vs. Non-Profit

For-Profit-Employee “Volunteers”


It’s the duty of all Free Software developers to steal as much time as they can from their employers for software freedom.

— Jeremy Allison, Director, Conservancy & Member, Samba Team

What Can NPOs Do?

Organization Proliferation

Aggregating Under Umbrella

Funding Through Conservancy

Conservancy Success: Twisted

Conservancy Success: Mercurial


I’m funding myself doing Linux kernel-space development contracts, but it slows down Mercurial because of the brain context switch to Python userspace.

— Matt Mackall, Mercurial Maintainer (in April 2010)


Conservancy Success: PyPy

More Info / Talk License

Presentation and slides are: Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012 Bradley M. Kuhn, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-By-SA) 3.0 United States License.

Some images included herein are ©’ed by others. I believe my use of those images is fair use under USA © law. However, I suggest you remove such images if you redistribute these slides under CC-By-SA-USA 3.0.