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The two are very similar. Conservancy has a pretty tight relationship with the FSF. Indeed, co-founder bkuhn is on the board of directors of both:

http://sfconservancy.org/about/board/

http://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board/

I rather like bkuhn, because he's a lawyer and a free hacker. His opinions on the GPL should be taken very seriously. I would only trust GPL-cowriter Eben Moglen himself more than bkuhn on GPL legalities.

The FSF does more advocacy and handles infrastructure for GNU packages. For example, they handle our GNU Octave donations. Conservancy handles similar tasks, plus legal services. They handle the donations of the other big project I like, Mercurial. Oh, and they do the same for git.

I also think bkuhn's writings are saying pretty much the same things that rms says, but in a different way that alienates fewer people, e.g. here is one on a fairly recent event you may remember:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/11/11/groupon.html




Kuhn was executive director of the FSF 2001-2005 (as FSF's staff-and-board page notes). He's been at this a while.


a visit just to your welcome page at groupon.com attempts to install a huge amount of proprietary Javascript on my machine — lucky I use NoScript to reject it

That's an eye-opening perspective! For the most part I agree with your point about alienating fewer people but the above quote stuck out.


bkuhn is not a lawyer. Karen and Tony are, however.


Oops! Oh well. I'll let my ignorance stand in my original comment instead of trying to edit myself into looking good. :-)


He has a lot of knowledge in copyright law. In areas related to the GPL, corporate lawyers don't necessarily match that knowledge.




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