Open source hoster Sourceware takes the red hat: Away from Red Hat towards SFC

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open source hoster sourceware takes the red hat away from.jpg
open source hoster sourceware takes the red hat away from.jpg

The Software Freedom Conservancy will take over the financial management of the Sourceware hosting service in the future. However, Red Hat continues to provide the hardware.

 

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) will most likely take over the “financial support” (fiscal sponsorship) for the Sourceware hosting service. This emerges from an entry in a mailing list in which the evaluation committee of the SFC approves an application for membership of the hosting project. The next step is the final legal vote.

 

Until now, the Linux distributor Red Hat was the sole umbrella organization for the open source hoster Sourceware. The American software company will continue to provide the hardware infrastructure and staff. Financially, however, the project is now becoming more independent: one is currently not in an emergency and no major expenses are expected. In the event that this changes, however, they want to protect themselves with the new “fiscal sponsor” SFC, according to Sourceware in the e-mail history.

“Fiscal sponsorship” does not mean that Sourceware will receive financial resources from the SFC in the future. Instead, the practice means that the hosting provider will have the same legal and tax status as the SFC in the future. At the same time, the Conservancy takes care of the finances of the Sourceware project and offers it other services. In return, the project donates 10 percent of its income to the SFC – at least that’s what the preliminary contract between the two organizations says.

However, the SFC emphasizes in the message that it expressly does not accept the many projects that are hosted at Sourceware as members. Among the most prominent open source projects that can be found at Sourceware are those of the GNU family. Most of them already have financial support, including from the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Nothing will change about that, you just take on Sourceware as the hosting platform.

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The SFC is a US registered charitable organization. It supports prominent OSS projects like Git, Inkscape, QEMU and Samba. Sourceware was created by Red Hat in 1998. Since then, the Linux distributor has managed the website itself. According to the project, the move to SFC should ensure more independence.