GNOME Foundation wants you to respect the GPL compliance

Jan 13, 2016 02:52 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project, a non-profit organization that delivers the open-source GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, announced on January 12, 2016, that they are supporting the work of Software Freedom Conservancy.

GNOME has been building open-source and free software distributed under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) and GPL (GNU General Public License) licenses for almost two decades, and they're proud members of the GNU Project.

But to ensure that their work will continue to be free for everyone to use or redistribute, they make an appeal for the community to follow the rules of the open-source licenses before attempting to "borrow" their code and make it proprietary.

"Bad actors could attempt to proprietarize our work without acknowledging our efforts and without giving back to our community. The GPL functions to support the Free Software model because there are legal consequences to violating it," reads the announcement.

Therefore, the GNOME Project announces its support for Software Freedom Conservancy, a charitable, non-profit organization dedicated to the Free Software movement, which provides education in the field of GPL compliance.

The GNOME community encourages individuals and companies to support Software Freedom Conservancy as well, ensuring its continued long-term operations to make sure that compliance happens.

Become a Software Freedom Conservancy supporter today by visiting https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/. Also, you can become a Friend of GNOME and financially support the GNOME Project too.