Staff

The staff are listed alphabetically by surname.

Rosanne DiMesio - Technical Bookkeeper

Rosanne DiMesio is the Technical Bookkeeper at the Software Freedom Conservancy where she handles incoming and outgoing accounting activities for all its member projects as well as financial operations for Conservancy itself. Rosanne has been volunteering with the Wine Project since 2008 where she focuses on user support and documentation. She has worked as an English teacher, a freelance writer and as IT support. She is passionate about helping free software projects improve their user experience. Rosanne received her Masters in Communication & Theater at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Chicago.

Denver Gingerich - Director of Compliance

Denver manages SFC's license compliance work, including its technical parts (such as triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding source) as well as planning and carrying out our enforcement strategy (with advice and input from SFC's Executive Director and Policy Fellow). Outside of SFC, Denver also co-runs a FOSS business. Previously, Denver authored financial trading software on Linux. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as LinuxCon North America, Texas Linux Fest, LibrePlanet, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, CopyleftConf, and the Open Video Conference.

Tracy Homer - Operations Manager

Tracy acts as Operations Manager at Software Freedom Conservancy. Bringing her super-skills of organization and love of bureaucracy, she helps things run at SFC smoothly behind the scenes. Tracy also serves on the board of her local hackerspace, an organization committed to teaching and promoting open technology exclusively. She feels that open techonology allows people to express their creativity regardless of their financial situation or technical background. Tracy is currently persuing a degree in GIS from the University of Tennessee.

Bradley M. Kuhn - Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn began as Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and became its first staff person in 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Rick Sanders - General Counsel

Rick Sanders, has over 20 years' experience as a intellectual-property litigator. He started his legal career at Fenwick & West's Silicon Valley office, then moved to Nashville to join Waller, before co-founding Aaron & Sanders, with the goal of providing sophisticated legal services to technology clients in Middle Tennessee. Rick also taught copyright law at Vanderbilt University School of Law, and he co-produced The Copyright Office Comes to Music City for many years. He is also a past chair of the American Bar Association's Trademarks and the Internet committee, and the Nashville Bar Association's Intellectual Property Section. He is admitted to the bar of the States of California and Tennessee, as well as the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and all U.S. District Courts in California and Tennessee. Before becoming a lawyer, Rick was a college instructor in English composition and literature, especially Shakespeare. He is a native of Mountain View, California and now lives in Nashville.

Karen M. Sandler - Executive Director

Karen M. Sandler is an attorney and the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology. As a patient deeply concerned with the technology in her own body, Karen is known as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software as a life-or-death issue, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. She co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for people who face under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in tech. She is an adjunct Lecturer-In-Law of Columbia Law School and a visiting scholar at University of California Santa Cruz.

Prior to joining Software Freedom Conservancy, Karen was the executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was the general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. She began her career as a lawyer at Clifford Chance and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. She also holds a bachelor of science in engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Sandler has won awards for her work on behalf of software freedom, including the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2011. She received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in 2023.

Sage Sharp - Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion

Sage Sharp is the Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the Software Freedom Conservancy. Sage runs Outreachy, which is Conservancy's diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people who are subject to systemic bias or impacted by underrepresentation in tech. Sage is a long-standing free software contributor, and is known for their work as a Linux kernel maintainer for seven years. They also founded their own company, Otter Tech, which has trained over 400 people on how to enforce a Code of Conduct.

Daniel Pono Takamori - Community Organizer & Non-Profit Problem Solver

Pono joined Conservancy to help fill a community need for bridging technical and non-technical roles. Having worked at FOSS foundations and organizations for over a decade, his background in FOSS infrastructure led him to think more deeply about how to better use community intelligence instead of technology to solve governance questions. He is passionate about making FOSS a more equitable and inclusive space. With a background in mathematics and physics, he looks forward to mobilizing social intelligence and community goveranance as a basis for solving both technical and non-technical problems.

Paul Visscher - Systems Administrator

Paul has been using Linux and FOSS for over 26 years and working as a sysadmin for over 20 years. Having fallen in love with computers at a young age, he found it intellectually intersting and found the FOSS world an incredible and natural place to learn. He brings a passion for how free and open source software can make our society a much more equitable place, and work for us rather than against us.