Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations
Posted Sep 7, 2012 17:44 UTC (Fri) by
bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
In reply to:
LinuxCon: funding development by njwhite
Parent article:
LinuxCon: funding development
akumria, Yes, for internal operations, Conservancy uses only Free Software. We don't impose this rule on our projects per se (although we urge them to). We wont' accept a project that develops proprietary software, but if they use proprietary software in said development, we bug them about it and try to get them to change, but we don't mandate that. After all, Samba developers have to test against Microsoft's stuff to make sure their code works.
But, that's admittedly a special case. A better example is that many of our projects use Eventbrite for registration to their conferences hosted by Conservancy, and many use Github to host their projects. Both platforms are proprietary network services (including installing proprietary Javascript onto your machine when you use them). I make our projects aware of this issue, but if they want to use these services, Conservancy doesn't forbid it. We recently had a project (the discussion is public) that's considering using a proprietary CI system as well, which we urged them not to but ultimately won't stop them if they do.
Meanwhile, for internal operations, Conservancy is 100% Free Software shop. njwhite is correct that Ledger has been a big part of that since around 2007 (when we switch to it from GNUCash). Conservancy is actually doing some upstream work with Ledger now (as of this week) to initially add some reporting scripts to contrib/. Long-term, we want to have a web interface that will allow a bookkeeper without Unix CLI and Emacs experience to keep the books. (I currently keep the books of Conservancy myself; in part because of that issue and in part because we don't have funding to hire a bookkeeper anyway. I'm working to solve the latter (please donate :), but the former will still be a problem even if we get the funding.
(
Log in to post comments)