About Conservancy

Conservancy is set up to help community-driven free software projects thrive. We help our member projects remain vendor-independent and focused on their work, either providing useful and well-maintained free software for their users or creating opportunities to welcome new people into free software.

Under US law, the best way to pursue a non-monetary goal is to incorporate as a charitable non-profit. This structure provides safe-guards against control by for-profit businesses, allows us to work in the public interest and gives us certain tax benefits. In return for that status, we have a responsibility to our donors (and to the IRS) to spend money wisely and only on mission-related work.

As a charity, we must be able to indisputably demonstrate to the IRS that we are upholding our mission and serving the public interest, which affects our policies in many different ways. If you are coming from the business world, the reporting requirements and spending restrictions might seem strange at first. But basically all of our fiscal and legal policies can be traced back to our mission to support community-driven free software and our non-profit structure which requires that we justify all spending as being 1) in support of our mission and 2) responsible and reasonably frugal.

This guide is set up so that you can skip to the part you need right now, often with links to other topics that might be useful around that time. The first few sections discuss your relationship with Conservancy, the middle parts go through all the ways your project can work with Conservancy on specific tasks and then the third section contains information on activities that we know make free software projects more successful and efficient.

What you can expect from us as a Member Project

Conservancy is set up to help you thrive as a community-driven free software project. You can focus on your work providing well-maintained free software and welcoming new people into the world of free software. We will do our best to support you in any way we can. Some of the things we can help you with include:

What we expect from you

This is a team effort between your project and us. We only have a few employees so we ask that you don't think of this as a customer/corporation relationship, but as your project being one part of a bigger goal of celebrating and advancing the world of free software. Working with all of the restrictions and requirements might seem strange at first, but we assure you that it is all an effort to keep us on mission. Here are some things you can do to help us: