PearPC Donates Legal Defense Fund to SFLC
March 30, 2007
Recently, we received a letter from a developer of PearPC, thanking SFLC for the legal advice we have provided the project.
Hello, my name is Cassondra Foesch, and I, along with many other PearPC contributers, were being represented by the Software Freedom Law Center surrounding events as a result of the actions of a company Maui X-Stream, and their product CherryOS.
During the course of this representation, it was indicated that any legal costs arrising from action being necessary in Hawai’i would not be covered Pro Bono, and at that time, I made a plea to the PearPC community, which eventually leaked to the “geek” community at large, where I requested support in the form of monetary donations. The enormous upswell of support and publicity that we gained from that was likely very instrumental in demonstrating to MXS that they in a very bad position, and caused them to entirely fold up the CherryOS project.
I have since been retaining these funds in confidence of the community for a few years, as a precaution in case anything came up at some point, and PearPC needed a fund for legal representation. The other primary PearPC developers, and I are however in accord that all actions concerning PearPC and CherryOS are settled, and there is no need for us to retain these funds anymore.
We currently have $3,000 that we would enjoy presenting to the SFLC on behalf of the entire PearPC community, and the F/OSS community for the excellent representation, and legal advice that was given to us, in hopes that you can continue to provide services and support to F/OSS projects as you did with us.
Cassondra Foesch
(I am acting solely as a representative of the PearPC community and developers, and my actions in no way represent the company, which I work for.)
SFLC gratefully accepts this donation from the PearPC community. We remain committed to providing the best available pro-bono legal services to free software projects.