Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Evergreen project as its newest member. Evergreen joins twenty-six other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.
Conservancy and the Evergreen community, including librarians, developers, and documenters, are excited to announce that Evergreen is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a home to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FLOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with financial and administrative services and FLOSS project policy and non-profit oversight. This allows software developers and documenters to focus on those activities exclusively.
By joining the Conservancy, Evergreen obtains the benefits of a formal non-profit organizational structure while keeping the project focused on software development and documentation. Some benefits of joining the Conservancy include the ability to collect donations, hold assets on behalf of the project, and some protection of the lead developers of the project from personal liability when engaging in the activities of the project. A full list of Conservancy member project benefits is available on Conservancy’s website. The Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, incorporated in New York State.
About Evergreen
The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by hundreds of libraries across the world. The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition and cataloging of library materials, and sharing resources among groups of libraries and consortia on the same Evergreen system. Evergreen is designed to be scalable and supports library operations ranging from a small high school to large state-wide consortia. Evergreen is released under the GPL version 2 or later.