*** Why does your project want to join Conservancy? Specifically, what benefits do you expect to take advantage of immediately and within a few years? We want an overhead organization managing donations an other funding. We also want the transparency and stability an organization can give. We want to grow as a software and need a foundation behind us to do so.
*** 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 prosand cons of the various organizations you've applied to? We have not. After an evaluation we found SFC would fit our project the best. We do need an organization so if we won't make it into SFC we will then look for other alternatives. *** Please give a detailed description of the project. Synfig Studio is a 2D vector animation software. It is highly competent and very versatile with a value node system where almost anything can be animated. Different values can be connected and complex math formulas can be used to create intricate relationships. In this aspect it is very much up to par and rivaling with proprietary 2D animation systems. Often even surpassing them. It is cross platform, working on Linux, Apple and Microsoft systems. *** 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-2.0license"). Please be sure to include information on documentation licensing as well as software licensing. All the source code files are licensed under GNU GPL v2. The file of some splash screen source code (Synfig documents) are licensed under Public Domain or CC0. Example files from Voria included in Synfig is licenced as CC-BY-NC-SA. Other non-Voria example files is GPL v2 "or later". *** Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the project, including both code and community plans. At the moment we have one developer porting the render engine to Cairo making Synfig canvas faster to work with as well as faster output rendering. We have another developer making a redesign of the UI with a unified window design as one of it's goals. We recently was contacted by a UI designer that want to help the community with this so we're expecting even more progress in the near future. A scripting system has been developed and are in progress of being applied to trunk. It integrates python scripting in Synfig, making it even more versatile. A bone-skeleton feature has been discussed and some development has been made. This is a way to manipulate flat 2D surfaces like puppets in 3D software like Blender. *** Please give us the main link to the projects primary website. www.synfig.org *** Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or checkout. We are currently using Sourceforge: git://synfig.git.sourceforge.net But it is very slow and doesn't allow https access so we are maintaining a mirror in Github where we would eventually migrate: g...@github.com:synfig/synfig.git *** 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? Yes. We've had some donations that is currently handled by our project leader Carlos Lopez. These fundings are going to be used by him for travel expenses and accomodation to attend Libre Graphics Meeting 2013. Yes, there is a small remaining amount of money that is in the hands of Carlos in a personal (bussiness) Paypal account. Apart of that, Carlos owns another Paypal account (enterprise type) that we started to use to collect funds, but as soon as Paypal requsted the documentation where we could demonstrate that we are a non profit organization, we stopped using it. There is about 40-50 euros in that account. It was one of the main reasons to look for a higher umbrella organization to handle the donations because Carlos doesn't want to hold high amount of money to avoid problems with the taxes. *** 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? No, not currently. Individual team members do have campaigns for LGM travel expenses, but we do not have any Synfig fundraising at the moment. One reason we do not is that the funding is handled by an individual rather than an organisation. The current collected money in the hands of Carlos was collected during 2011-2012 campaings. *** Is your project able and willing to participate in fundraising campaigns with Conservancy on an annual or perhaps more frequent basis? Yes, we would like that. *** 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? The logo was trademarked by Voria Studios but the trademark status has since expired. It was developed as an internal tool for Voria Studio and was later open sourced. It was released as open source software in late 2005 and was developed as proprietary inhouse software for about 2 and a half years before that. Initially called SINFG it was renamed to Synfig before the open source release. *** 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? Yes. Drawn by Robert Quattlebaum (Darco) at Voria studio around 2004. Displayed in all official Synfig context like program icon, splash screen, documentation, web page, forums, ads, etc. Licenced as GPLv2. Here is an interesting blog post from 2005 giving the story behind the logo, http://www.deepdarc.com/2005/12/22/making-the-voria-logo/ *** 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? No. *** 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. Synfig Studio was developed as an inhouse tool focusing on fractal animation at Voria Studio by Robert Quattlebaum (darco). It was open sourced November 1, 2005. (http://wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Releases/DeveloperPreview) After open sourced, management of the project was taken over by Paul Wise (pabs) who organized the resources to make it a project available for the community. He hosted the project source code at Sourceforge and set up a virtual machine with wiki and forums. Virtual machine was in hands of darco. During 2005 to 2007-2008 Chris Moore reworked the source code to make it run properly in Linux and Windows (with the help of Chris Norman (pixelgeek) and Paul Wise) After that Synfig get attention of other people (like Carlos López (genete) and Konstantin Dmitriev (zelgadis)). The first from the point of view of the code and the second as artist. Carlos and Chris Moore worked together on setup the bones-skeleton structure code. Chris last commit is from Jan 13 2009. Paul Wise leaved Synfig about 2009 July when the resigned to be the debian packager maintainer. After Pauls retirement Konstantin and Carlos takes care of the infrastructure to keep the project resources to continue working. Konstantin then moved the wiki and the forums to Tuxfamily and setup a website there using Concrete 5 engine. Also the project website moved from the .com domain to the .org doman being hosted at Tuxfamily. Due to many restrictions in manegability of the resources and bad speed access from the net Konstantin decided to host the forums and the website on a personal virtual machine meanwhile the wiki still in Tuxfamily. That's the current status today. Currently, darco is still defraying the synfig.org domain. Since Konstantin and Carlos take the leading of the project, other artists, coders and community has grown up. *** Please explain how your project is governed. Who makes the decisions in the project? How do you resolve disputes, particularly about non-code issues? We have a small core of dedicated people, developers and enthusiasts that are considered to be the development team. These do communication and decisions in the developer-mailing-list and IRC-chat. Disputes are resolved by discussions in these foras also. If disputes can't be resolved by reasoning then the project leaders voice tend to weight more in a decision. *** 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? We do not currently offer this but could well do in the future if such service would be asked for. *** 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? No, noone. *** 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 beenpackaged yet. Yes, packaged for all major systems; Ubuntu, Debian in graphics Arch (in AUR) Fedora We also have packages for non linux systems as MacOS and Microsoft Windows. *** 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, we have not, neither have we had in he past. We are however in discussions with a large animation studio, which are interested in funding some Synfig development as they are looking for an open source Macromedia Flash replacement. *** 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)? It is difficult to calculate but based on our forum posts, the website traffic, the IRC activity, the Google+ and Facebook activities we believe that we have about 600 to 700 active users. *** 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. Non active today ================ Robert Quattlebaum (Darco) - da...@deepdarc.com - Voira owner Original developer at Voria Studios. Mainly 2002-2005. Adrian Bentley - unknown email - Employed(?). Developer at Voria Studios, before Synfigs open source release. 2002 - 2005 Paul Wise (pabs) - pa...@bonedaddy.net - Volunteer Took over project management after the GPL release 2005-2009 Chris Moore (dooglus) - doog...@gmail.com - Volunteer Coder leader 2005-2009 Nikita Kitaev (nikiatik) - nikita...@gmail.com - Volunteer Coder 2009 - 2012 Gerco Ballintijn (gballintijn) - Volunteer Coder 2008 -2009 Active today ============ Carlos Lopez (genete) - genet...@gmail.com - Volunteer Project leader and lead developer. 2007- today. Konstanin Dimitriev (zelgadis) - ksee.zelga...@gmail.com - Volunteer Project leader and maintainer. Growing coder. 2008-today. Chris Norman (pixelgeek) - pxeg...@gmail.com - Volunteer Windows maintainer 2005-today Yu Chen (jcome) - jco...@gmail.com - Volunteer Coder, designer 2008 - today Diego Barrios (eldruin) - eldr...@gmail.com - Volunteer Coder 2010 - today There are other contributors that helps with the wiki, forums and spreading Synfig around (maybe others in the past not listed): David Rylander (rylleman): rylle...@gmail.com Oliver Horn (ohoservices): oliver.h...@ohoservices.de J茅r么me Blanchi (d.j.a.y.): d.j....@free.fr For complete list of credits there is a code contribution statistics here: http://www.ohloh.net/p/synfig/contributors?query=&sort=kudo_position As well as a community presentation wiki page here: http://wiki.synfig.org/wiki/People *** Please include any other pertinent information not given above that you feel we should review with your application. Synfig Studio is filling a void in the open source animation niche. There are no other 2D vector animation tool (at least of some maturity and usability) giving an alternative to proprietary commercial tools like Adobe Flash, Anime Studio, ToonBoom or Adobe After Effects. Synfig does however need to mature and grow, attracting more developers, adding vital features as well as being able to provide a stable tool up to par with commercial alternatives that won't fail on you in critical productions. For this we need a strong organisation behind our back, supporting us. We do have an unique software that has a huge potential but we need you to help us reach out as a serious alternative for animators. 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. ###################################################################### -- Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy -- *********************** David Rylander Rylander animation Bergsrådsvägen 102, bv 12842 Bagarmossen 0708-461978 www.rylanderanimation.se *********************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr _______________________________________________ Synfig-devl mailing list Synfig-devl@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/synfig-devl
