LLVM Offered Into The Software Freedom Conservancy

The LLVM project applied to be part of the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Conservancy's Project Evaluation Committee has approved of accepting the increasingly popular open-source compiler infrastructure.

Bradley Kuhn announced that the evaluation committee has approved of accepting LLVM for the Software Freedom Conservancy. As described from their website, "The Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while Conservancy takes care of the projects' needs that do not relate directly to software development and documentation."

Bradley's message was sent to the LLVM developers' list but is not appearing at the moment within the public archives at the moment, so it's been embedded below.

I'm sorry for the intrusion of a project policy discussion onto the developer list, but there may be many here who may have thoughts, input, or question regarding Conservancy's offer for LLVM's membership, discussed below. If you're not interested in that topic, please feel free to ignore this message.

TL;DR: LLVM applied to the Conservancy and has been offered membership. The FSA template should be reviewed by all interested parties.

Full Details:

I am excited to inform you that Conservancy's Project Evaluation Committee has approved LLVM for membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy.

If LLVM proceeds to accept membership, the next step is to negotiate a formal agreement between the project and the Conservancy, which is called
a fiscal sponsorship agreement (FSA). You can find a template of the agreement available on Conservancy's website at:
http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/ConservancyFSATemplate.pdf
http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/conservancy-fsa-template.tex

Generally, Conservancy leaves it for the LLVM community to decide how you'd like to discuss the document internally. Note that signing such an agreement is a big step for the project and you should consider the agreement carefully, in whatever forum is most appropriate for your community.
Conservancy strongly suggests that a public discussion of the FSA occur on the general discussion list for developers of your project, which is why I've posted this information here on your public list.

Conservancy representatives would be glad to answer questions from the community as you consider the document, and you should feel comfortable cc'ing us on any discussion threads. Meanwhile, you are also welcome to batch questions into one group as well and email them to us directly, and just repost the responses. Basically, whatever works well for you works fine for us.

Also cc'ed is Conservancy's "Project Intake group", which can be reached by the alias [email protected] and is comprised of the
following people: Bradley M. Kuhn, Tony Sebro, Jeremy Allison, Tom Callaway, Martin Michlmayr

All of us are members of Conservancy's Project Evaluation Committee and will be happy to answer questions and you should also feel free to cc that address, too, if you'd like, when asking questions.

Meanwhile, Conservancy's detailed discussion will mostly be with the application leads, Chris Lattner and Tanya M. Lattner. Ultimately, Conservancy will rely on the application leads to coordinate the final details of the FSA with Conservancy.

Specifically, note that the FSA template is in fact, just that, a template. Most notably, we'll need to figure out together two key terms of the agreement:

(a) who the initial signatories should be (ideally it should include anyone who has ever made substantial contributions to the project),

(b) who the Project Leadership Committee (PLC) should be, how it should govern itself, and what it should be called. Note there are a few examples in the FSA template of how other projects have done this, but they are just guidelines, not choices. The most important thing is to write something that describes the natural and existing leadership structure of your project.

Meanwhile, there are a few other minor issues that we've raised in a private thread with the application leads.

We look forward to LLVM joining Conservancy. But, Conservancy does realize that you are also talking to other potential fiscal sponsors, and we definitely encourage this. We want LLVM to find the right home; perhaps that is Conservancy, but if not, we understand!

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Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy