Watir Project Application to Software Freedom Conservancy

For previous versions of the application see Charley’s, Bret’s and Željko’s gists.

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The Software Freedom Conservancy encourages your project to apply for
Conservancy. Please be advised that applying doesn’t guarantee your
project can join Conservancy; it’s simply the first step in the process
of joining Conservancy.

Please note that Conservancy currently has a long queue for project
applications, so we cannot assure you when you will receive a response to
your application. Feel free to ping Conservancy at any time to inquire
about the status of your application.

To apply to the Conservancy, please answer fully all the questions below,
in a single text-only (i.e., not HTML) email to
<apply@sfconservancy.org>. Please try to be as concise as possible while
making sure to answer the questions fully.

If the relevant information is already gathered and publicly available,
It’s ok to include URLs as answers. However, if a given URL has lots of
information on it, please make sure that you direct us specifically to
the portions of the web page loaded by the given URL that are relevant in
answering the question.

Conservancy Application Questions:

• Why does your project want to join Conservancy? Specifically, what
  benefits do you expect to take advantage of immediately and within a
  few years?

• Conservancy does encourage projects to apply to multiple non-profit
  homes to find the best fit. Does your project have an application
  pending with any other non-profit homes? What do you see as the pros
  and cons of the various organizations you’ve applied to?

• Please give a detailed description of the project.

• What FLOSS License(s) does your project use? Please include the
  primary license, and list other licenses for code that is included.
  (e.g., “The project as a whole is GPLv3-or-later, but about a dozen
  files in the directory src/external/ are under the Apache-2.0
  license”). Please be sure to include information on documentation
  licensing as well as software licensing.

• Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the
  project, including both code and community plans.

• Please give us the main link to the projects primary website.

• Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or
  checkout.

• Have you ever had funds held by the project, or by any individual on
  behalf of the project? How and for what did you spend those funds?
  Are there funds remaining? If so, who is holding them now?

• Do you have any ongoing fundraising programs for your project? How do
  they operate, and how much funding is brought in through these mechanisms
  currently? Where do you expect most of your donor base to be
  geographically?

• Going forward, once inside Conservancy, how do you expect to spend funds
  that you raise? What types of activity do you want to ask Conservancy to
  take on your behalf? Where geographically do you want those activities
  to take place?

• Is your project able and willing to participate in fundraising
  campaigns with Conservancy on an annual or perhaps more frequent
  basis?

• Does your project owe funds to anyone?

• Who currently holds your projects’ trademarks, if any? When was your
  projects’ name first used, and who used it?

• Does you project have a logo? If so, who drew it, when did they draw
  it, where is it displayed and what is its license?

• Are you aware of anyone in your project, individual or company,
  holding a patent in any jurisdiction that are in any way related to
  your project?

• Has your project ever had legal trouble, been involved in legal
  proceedings or received a letter accusing your project of patent,
  copyright, trademark or other types of infringement?

• Please give a brief history of the project, focusing on how the
  community developed and the general health of the community. Be sure
  to include information on any forks or other disputes that have
  occurred in the community.

• Please explain how your project is governed. Who makes the decisions
  in the project? How do you resolve disputes, particularly about
  non-code issues?

• Does your project currently offer, or wish to offer any consulting or
  training services (such as deployment, administration or other such
  services of the software for users) to your user base? If so, how do
  you structure (or seek to structure) this work?

• Is anyone in the project currently offering a Software as a Service
  system based on project? If so, how is that offering governed,
  coordinated and is the software that runs the service made fully
  available to your users?

• If your project runs on Linux-based systems, please list all the
  distributions that include your project, and what “repository area”
  the package appears in. If you aren’t packaged for any major
  distributions, please tell us why you believe your project hasn’t been
  packaged yet.

• Does your project have any existing for-profit or non-profit
  affiliations, funding relationships, or other agreements between the
  project and/or key leaders of your project and other organizations?
  Has the project had such affiliations in the past? Please list of all
  of them in detail and explain their nature. Even tangential
  affiliations and relationships, or potential affiliations that you
  plan to create should be included.

• Approximately how many users does your project have, and what items
  lead you to believe your userbase is of a particular size (e.g., post
  counts to your user mailing list)?

• Please list the names, email addresses, and affiliations (e.g.,
  employer) of key developers and major contributors. Include both
  current and past contributors and developers. Please include date
  ranges of when those developers/contributors were active.

Please make this list as extensive and complete as possible. You need not include every last person who sent one patch, but please include at least those who regularly sent patches or were/are regular contributors. If you project has contributors who have been inactive for more than five years, you need only to list such inactive contributors if they made substantial contributions.

• Please include any other pertinent information not given above that
  you feel we should review with your application.

Please note that your answers will be shared with Conservancy’s Board of
Directors, its Evaluation Committee (the membership of which will be
published soon on Conservancy’s website), and with some of Conservancy’s
existing member projects leaders. We like to get as much input as
possible from Conservancy’s existing project base when evaluating new
projects for membership.

Please submit the application in pure ASCII format, with paragraph fills
and line breaks designed for 80 column viewing. You don’t need to
impress us with formatting; what will actually impress us is if you make
the information presented in a simple and clear way that is easily read
and understood when edited with GNU Emacs and emailed around internally
at Conservancy via standard email forwarding tools.

Before completing your application, please be sure to read our
application FAQ at: http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/

Feel free to include any additional information you’d like us to review
in considering an application, but please try to be brief as possible.

Please note that Conservancy does require that projects consider donating
a percentage of their funding to the general operating costs of the
Conservancy. This is a way to assure we can continue providing a high
level of service to all Conservancy projects. We’ll discuss this further
and in detail after the evaluation process.

Please be advised that you may get follow-up clarification questions on
your application. Please be prepared to respond to these inquiries
quickly to assure timely processing of your application.