Hey, I figured I'd post this here as it's something that probably warrants more long-form discussion.
I've been a supporter of the Software Freedom Conservancy [1] for a while now, and their recent push [2] to get more aggressive with respect to aggregigous GPL violators is something that could directly benefit ongoing Rockbox devlelopment. Part of this is an initiative to develop alternative firmware [3] for hardware, a near-perfect alignment to the sort of thing Rockbox has been doing for the past 18 or so years. I've already reached out to them about possibly including Rockbox under that umbrella, and pointed out some of the OEMs that ship players based on Linux but don't provide any sources. But all that aside, this got me thinking; the SFC also accepts "member projects" to operate under their umbrella, providing services including handling donations (which become tax-deductible!), holding assets, legal support, and copyright enforcement. [4] At the moment, I'm wearing many of these hats (and then some) for Rockbox and I'd rather just concentrate on helping keep rockbox relevant, especially with respect to new hardware ports. Rockbox appears to be a good fit for operating under the SFC's aegis, as we're explicitly GPL'd, and our accessibility framework in particular indisputably places a lot of our efforts into the public interest. I should point out that copyright assignment is *not* required, so in my view if enough of the [semi-]active developers here think this is worth pursuing, I'll reach out to the SFC and start the process. Personally, I think this is will be an overwhelmingly net positive, but it's not someting I think I should unilaterally do. Comments? [1] https://sfconservancy.org [2] https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-strategy-launched-with-ARDC-grant/ [3] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liberation.html [4] https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/ - Solomon -- Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp) @pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix) High Springs, FL speachy (freenode)
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
