Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the nonprofit home of dozens of free and open source software projects including Git, Etherpad, QEMU, Selenium and Inkscape (to name a few. She 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.

Prior to joining Conservancy, she was the executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was the general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for people who are subject to systemic bias and underrepresented in tech. Karen is an adjunct Lecturer-In-Law at Columbia Law School and a Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Cruz. She is the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2017 Award for the Advancement of Free Software as well as an O'Reilly Open Source Award.