how-to-apply-to-conservancy.txt

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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?

    Immediately: We would want to transfer ownership of assets (potentially
    including source code) to the Conservancy. The benefit to Tidy/HTACG is to
    safeguard them against control by a single individual (current me).

    Longer term: The longer term benefit is to ensure that HTML Tidy is
    continuously developed and deployed without regard to a single individual
    or a small group taking actions, or perhaps more importantly, not taking
    actions.

*** 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?

    There are currently no other applications pending.

*** Please give a detailed description of the project.

    HTML Tidy is the C library (and command line utility) that
    - parses HTML files
    - corrects common mistakes
    - diagnoses issues and makes reports
    - "pretty prints" the corrected code
    - performs accessibility assessments

    HTML Tidy is ubiquitous. It is included by default in some operating
    systems and has extensive support in languages such as PHP, PERL, Ruby;
    and is available as a module in server systems such as mod-tidy.

*** 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.

    The license  (https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)
    is not identifiable as a verbatim copy of any particular FOSS license.
    However it is very similar in concept to APACHE/MIT/etc. With the
    cooperation of the current copyright holders we would be interested in
    transitioning to a "standard" license.

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

    - 30 days: release the heralded, new 5.0.0 version of HTML Tidy.
    - 90 days: updates to all of the major Linux/Unix/MacOS software
      repositories.
    - long term: track developments of official HTML specifications as well as
      begin consideration for recommendations and drafts in the current W3C
      working groups and community groups (i.e., support for non-standard
      standards).
    - user community: with the prestige of a 5.0.0 new release imminent we hope
      to prove to the user community that although Tidy was dormant, the project
      has not died. Various package maintainers (e.g., BSD, HomeBrew) have
      reached out to us with renewed interest. Introducing modern standards to
      the venerable library is already generating much interest. Tidy's
      ubiquity is fairly anonymous, however; its "user community" principally
      consists of package maintainers and developers.
    - developer community: the size of the developer community has waned in
      recent years due to disinterest by the previous maintainers. Growing the
      size of the developer community is perhaps our most important task in the
      next year to 18 months.
    - total community: the plan for growth for both of these communities is to
      blanket the appropriate parts of the internet via social media upon the
      release of the stable 5.0.0.

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

    http://www.html-tidy.org   - main project/product
    http://www.htacg.org       - our maintainer organization

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

    https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5

*** 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?

    No funds have ever been held by the project, or any individual associated
    with the project, to the best of my knowledge.

*** 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?

    No current fundraising is in progress.

    Barring litigation we expect that our expenses shall be fairly low:
    - Annual domain name registration
    - Hosting, if we feel that our current solution is inadequate.

    In general most of the costs of distribution are borne by 3d parties, e.g.,
    FOSS repositories that package HTML Tidy.

    We would expect most of the donor base to be from North America and Western
    Europe.

*** 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?

    One prospect that excites us (should we raise funds) is internationalization
    and localization. Current Tidy is English only, although it used on every
    populated continent. Recall that Tidy isn't a simple "pretty printer"; it's
    a serious diagnostic tool that generates detailed reports, and as such
    professional-level translation is valuable to our users.

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

    The project is willing to support fundraising, and will make strong efforts
    to ensure that project members join in such efforts when available.

*** Does your project owe funds to anyone?

    No.

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

    No trademarks are currently registered with any government organization
    to our knowledge. Insofar as a common law trademark, it probably still
    "rightly" belongs to Dave Raggett. It was first used in 1998.

*** 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?

    The project has several current logos in Illustration and SVG format:
    https://github.com/htacg/community/tree/master/proposals_logos

    These were drawn by Jim Derry (me) in 2015-January, and encompass artwork
    by the W3C per the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

    Currently displayed:
    http://www.html-tidy.org
    http://www.htacg.org

    No license has been assigned. Elements that are not licensed from W3C
    are copyright by Jim Derry. I am willing to assign this copyright to other
    organizations and release it under any license or release it to the public
    domain.


*** 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?

    No.

*** 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?

    Not to my knowledge.

*** 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.

    http://www.html-tidy.org/#history
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Tidy

    In 2011 some of the maintainers of the SourceForge project took exception
    with the W3C apparently attempting to wrest control over the project once
    again: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/html-tidy/2012JanMar/0019.html

    HTACG has since taken over the W3C effort, and we have reached out to
    the previous maintainers in an effort to assuage them.

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

    HTACG's governance is new since 2015-January, and as such we're still
    learning how to govern properly. There are several types of decisions that
    are made and the decision process is unique to each of them.

    - Features and specification decisions are made per discussion on the
      mailing lists and bug tracker, with much weight given to the official
      HTML specifications and the behavior of the W3C validator. The lead
      developer makes a feasibility assessment, and with feedback from the
      current HTACG chairman a decision is made to either implement the
      behavior immediately, defer it to a later version, or reject is as not
      part of the project's goals.

    - Governance decisions are currently made exclusively by the current
      Chair. To date there have been no issues for debate, although the
      potential for such is the main reason that we are reaching out to the
      Conservancy for membership. The current Chair recognizes that governance
      originating from a small, concentrated group (or even a single, well-
      meaning individual) is dangerous to the long term health and survival of
      such an important project.

*** 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?

    The project does not current offer any services. Providing such services
    is not _currently_ on our radar, as our number one priority is growth.
    Given the nature of the project and its integration into other systems this
    is not an impossible future state.

*** 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?

    Not to my knowledge.

*** 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.

    RPM: http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=tidy
    Ubuntu: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=tidy
    Debian: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=tidy
    FreeBSD (Unix): https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/www/tidy-lib/
    Mac OS X (Unix): 
    https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/tidy.1.html

*** 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.

    No.

*** 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)?

    This is a _very_ difficult question to answer! Tidy is *ubiquitous* and
    is used as part of other systems every day. As above it's available in
    most major Linux and Unix repositories, comes pre-installed on all Mac OS X
    systems, and is used as a C library in countless server applications
    (mod-tidy), text editors and IDEs on multiple platforms.

    As of 2014 HTML Tidy is deployed to 80 million Mac OS X systems alone.

    Due to the nature of using Tidy as a library, there's definitely a
    separation between the end-user-base and the developer- or integrator-user-
    base.

    The developer user base had grown small prior to HTACG involvement in the
    project. We attribute this to disinterest by the previous maintainers.
    However since its establishment in 2015-January, we have already seen
    escalating growth in interest from developers. For example Q3-2014 (before
    HTACG) there were only seven messages on the W3C mailing list. Since
    establishing HTACG, Q1-2015 has increased 300%. This is still very low
    compared to Tidy's peak of 514 in Q1-2000 (and this is simply a developer
    list). We anticipate growing to previous levels in the next 12 to 18 months
    following the release of new 5.0.0.


*** 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.

    1998 to 2000    - Rave Raggett (dsr@w3.org)
    2000 to 2009    - Terry Teague (deceased 2005)
                    - Arnaud Desitter (arnaud_desitter@yahoo.co.uk)
                    - Bjoern Hoehrmann (derhoermi@gmx.net)
                    - Charles Reitzel (creitzel@rcn.com)
    2011 to 2014    - Michael Smith (mike@w3.org)
    2003 to present - Geoff McLane (ubuntu@geoffair.info)


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

    Although "current management" is new, HTML Tidy is an established product
    with a history that stretches back to the dialup days. The established
    installed based of millions is an indication of the importance of Tidy
    to workflows all over the world. 

    The benefits of joining the Conservancy to HTML Tidy are obvious. We hope
    that by joining we can offer benefits to the Conservancy and its other
    member projects, as well.

    Thank you for your consideration.

Please note that your answers will be shared with Conservancy's Board of
Directors, its Evaluation Committee (the membership of which is
published 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.
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