Snowdrift.coop Partners

Connected partners

Open Source Initiative

As the primary Open Source advocacy group, OSI formed to promote Open Source collaborative development in businesses. Their emphasis and re-branding of “free software” was contentious as it downplayed the ethical and political issues advocated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Today, OSI retains a more pragmatic and less activist approach but has stronger and explicit support for software freedom. Since late 2015, Snowdrift.coop has been a formal OSI affiliate and incubator project with OSI serving as a pre-launch fiscal sponsor for larger grants to Snowdrift.coop as well as providing accountability and outside advising.

OSU Open Source Lab (OSUOSL)

Oregon State University has a semi-independent 501(c)(3) organization called the Open Source Lab. They offer sysadmin and hosting services to community Open Source software projects. Their support of the Snowdrift.coop infrastructure enables us to dedicate more of our limited resources toward our main development and launch.

QuestionCopyright.org (QCO)

A FLO culture and public-domain advocacy and educational organization. QCO endorses our efforts to help artist make a living without relying on copyright restrictions. The QCO Artist-in-Residence, Nina Paley, created the Mimi and Eunice characters that we adapted and used. QCO Founder and director Karl Fogel was also an early informal advisor, giving feedback and encouragement since the earliest days of Snowdrift.coop.

Open Invention Network

Snowdrift.coop has agreed to the OIN licensing pool stating that we will cross-license any patents we ever hold (we anticipate having none though) to other members of the OIN. The purpose of the OIN is to assure that patents won’t be used aggressively against Linux and the Linux ecosystem.

Copyfree Initiative

The CI advocates specifically for those FLO licenses they consider “Copyfree” which place no restrictions on materials outside of the licensed work itself, not even the copyleft restrictions on maintaining the license for derivatives. Copyfree licenses range from effective public-domain dedications to licenses that include liability waivers, requirements to include the license, and protection from false claims of endorsement or attribution. Copyfree licenses are maximally compatible with all other works. See the full definition at http://copyfree.org/standard. Although we use copyleft licenses ourselves at Snowdrift.coop, we respect projects freedom to choose their preferred FLO licenses.