Hello Bradley,
here is our updated application for Synfig Studio (attached text
document). We've updated some parts and added some new information.
Regards,
David Rylander, on behalf of Synfig Studio
On 04/03/2014 12:51 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
David,
I realize it's been a year since we've been in touch about joining
Conservancy. Conservancy has been overloaded with work and we had just
two people on full-time staff, and as I mentioned when you first
inquired way back in August 2012, Conservancy always prioritizes the
needs of existing projects over new applicants.
We have some wonderful news that we've added another full-time staffer
to Conservancy. Details are here:
http://sfconservancy.org/news/2014/mar/31/karen-joins/
As such, that allows us to begin moving on new member applications
again, finally! I do have your materials that you submitted in 2013,
and we're prepared to review them at our 2014-04-17 evaluation committee
meeting. I wanted to ask if you wanted to update anything in the
attached application before I send them to the committee?
Just send me back a modified version of the below if you have any
updates.
*** 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 would like to have our project to be registered as organization for legal
managing donations and other funding. But we have a limited human resource,
which makes problematic to form and maintain separate, new organization by
ourselves.
By joining Conservancy we would like to get benefits of being registered
non-profit entity, while keeping the ability to concentrate on development
work as it is.
By establishing our project as legal non-profit organization we would like to
introduce the transparency for donations management and allow our donors to
provide tax-deductible donations.
*** 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?
We haven’t applied for any other non-profit homes.
*** Please give a detailed description of the project.
Synfig Studio is a 2D vector animation software, designed as powerful
industrial-strength solution for creating high-quality animation using a
vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation
frame-by frame, allowing to produce 2D animation with fewer people and
resources.
Synfig Studio is cross platform, working on Linux, Mac OSX and Microsoft
Windows 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.
*** Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the
project, including both code and community plans.
Our actual development roadmap can be found here:
http://wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Dev:Roadmap
As part of the community plans we would like to engage our users into funding
of Synfig development. At the moment this is done by running a monthly
fundraising campaigns, which allows us to keep one full-time developer.
We also consider other methods, like monthly subscriptions and bounties
(through BountySource.com).
*** Please give us the main link to the projects primary website.
http://www.synfig.org/
*** Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or checkout.
https://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?
We've had some donations collected in the past that was handled by former
project leader Carlos López. These funds were transferred to the monthly
fundraiser campaigns described below.
Some funds, about 50€, is still held at Carlos’ Paypal account that was
locked because Synfig couldn’t prove any non profit organization status.
In May 2013 one of our community members - Konstantin Dmitriev - was awarded
by personal grant from Shuttleworth Foundation in the amount of $5000.
(http://goo.gl/TQvD65).
60% of these money he decided to use for Synfig development and hired a
professional C++ developer Ivan Mahonin
(http://goo.gl/ja4xYB).
Those money covered Ivan’s work for the period of 3 months.
The rest of the grant was spent on creating a video training package for Synfig
(http://goo.gl/qYiUBK).
The subsequent months of Ivan’s work were funded by community through monthly
fundraising campaigns. The fundraising campaigns are runned as personal
initiative of Konstantin Dmitriev. Currently we have had successfully funded
campaigns for October, November, December, January, February and March
(http://goo.gl/2wDgFO).
The money collected via fundraising go to developer Ivan Mahoin though the
hands and accounts of Konstantin.
Since January 2014 we also offer a subscription with a purpose to introduce
stable funding and collect recurring donations
(http://www.synfig.org/cms/en/news/taking-one-step-away-from-crowdfunding/).
At the moment we have only 2 donors subscribed, giving the total amount of $15
per month. These money are held at the personal account of Konstantin Dmitriev
and used by him to pay the remaining part of Ivan’s salary, which is not fully
covered by fundraising campaigns. This remaining part is also covered by
revenues from sales of video tutorial
(Synfig Training Package - http://goo.gl/qYiUBK),
which is produced and sold by Konstantin.
One of the main reasons for seeking a higher umbrella organization is to handle
the subscription donations and other possible funding, lifting the
responsibility and tax imposition from the shoulders of individual community
members.
*** 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?
Yes, we currently run a monthly fundraising campaign at Indiegogo to fund a full
time developer - http://synfig.org/cms/fundraising.
By this moment (April 2014) we have already $6958 brought into the benefit of
the project through this mechanism. All those funds are used to pay for work of
hired full-time developer.
Since January 2014 we also offer a subscription. Total amount of collected money
through this mechanism - $45.
*** 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 to.
*** 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 project’s logo was trademarked by Voria Studios but the trademark status
has expired since then.
Synfig was developed as a proprietary in-house tool by Voria Studio, but was
open-sourced in late 2005. Initially it was called “SINFG”, but was renamed
into “Synfig” when released as open source.
*** Does your project have a logo? If so, who drew it, when did they draw
it, where is it displayed and what is its license?
Yes, our project does have a logo
(http://goo.gl/zNUqZ3).
It was made by Robert Quattlebaum (Darco), founder of Voria studio, somewhere
in 2004.
The logo is displayed in all official Synfig context like program icon, splash
screen, documentation, web page, forums, etc.
The logo is licensed as GPLv2.
Here is an relevant blog post from 2005 giving the story behind the logo
creation - http://goo.gl/9wbloD
*** 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, we aren’t aware of anything like that.
*** 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, we haven’t had any such incidents.
*** 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 (aka darco). It was open sourced November 1,
2005 (http://goo.gl/vx9Fl7).
After being open sourced, management of the project was taken over by Paul Wise
(aka pabs) who organized the resources to make it a project available for the
community. He have hosted the project source code at Sourceforge and set up a
webserver with wiki and forums. The webserver was defrayed by Robert.
In the period of 2005 to 2009 Chris Moore reworked the source code to make it
run properly in Linux and Windows (with the help of Chris Norman (aka pixelgeek)
and Paul Wise).
After that Synfig got attention from other people, like Carlos López Gonzalez
(aka Genete) and Konstantin Dmitriev (aka Zelgadis). The first mentioned person
had an interest from the point of view of the code and the second as artist.
Carlos and Chris Moore worked together to implement the bones-skeleton structure
code. The last commit made by Chris last commit is dated by Jan 13 2009.
In July 2009 Paul Wise left the project. After Paul’s retirement Konstantin and
Carlos takes care of the infrastructure to keep the project’s resources
functional. Right now website hosting resources administered and paid by
Konstantin. At the current moment Konstantin is also holds the position of the
project maintainer. The synfig.org domain is still held by Robert Quattlebaum.
For the last years the community of Synfig got significant growth and keep
growing.
*** 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 team of regular contributors. These do communication and
decisions on the developer-mailing-list. Disputes are also resolved by
discussions through the same channels. If disputes can't be resolved by
reasoning then the project leader’s voice tend to weights more in a decision.
Konstantin Dmitriev is holding responsibility for money, collected through
monthly fundraising campaigns, so he is responsible for all code/implementation
decisions, related to the work of hired full-time developer.
*** 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 such services, but there is a video tutorial course
(Training Package - http://goo.gl/qYiUBK),
which is produced and sold by Konstantin Dmitriev.
*** 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?
We have no any Software as a Service system based on the project at the moment.
*** 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, our project does run on Linux-based systems.
Her’s the list of distributions that we are aware of:
* Ubuntu (in graphics)
* Debian (in graphics)
* Arch (in AUR)
* Fedora
* openSUSE
We also provide our own binary packages, compatible with most major Linux-based
systems, as well as MacOS and Microsoft Windows packages.
*** 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.
In December 2012 we were in discussions with a big animation studio from
Los Angeles, which were interested in funding some Synfig development as they
are looking for an open source Macromedia Flash replacement.
This interest has unfortunately cooled down because back then we weren’t able
to provide a full-time development resource to fulfill their requirements.
In May 2013 Konstantin Dmitriev had an agreement with Shuttleworth Foundation
upon receiving grant, mentioned above.
*** 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)?
We do not count our users, but we can provide following statistics:
- 1647 subscribers in Google+ social network
(https://plus.google.com/u/0/116089527095377496653/posts)
- 1115 subscribers in Facebook social network
(https://www.facebook.com/synfig.org)
- Around 700 downloads per day from Sourceforge.net.
- 1526 registered forum users
(http://synfig.org/forums/memberlist.php)
*** 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
2002 - 2005
Original developer at Voria Studios.
Adrian Bentley - unknown email
2002 - 2005
Developer at Voria Studios, before Synfig was open sourced.
Paul Wise (pabs) - pa...@bonedaddy.net
2005 - 2009
Took over project management when Synfig was released as open-source
Chris Moore (dooglus) - doog...@gmail.com
2005 - 2009
Lead developer
Nikita Kitaev (nikiatik) - nikita...@gmail.com
2009 - 2012
Code contributor
Gerco Ballintijn (gballintijn) - ge...@ballintijn.com
2008 - 2009
Code contributor
Chris Norman (pixelgeek) - pxeg...@gmail.com
2005-2013
Maintainer of Windows packages
Diego Barrios (eldruin) - eldr...@gmail.com
2010 - 2012
Code contributor
Oliver Horn (ohoservices) - oliver.h...@ohoservices.de
2010-2013
Documentation
Active contributors
==============
Carlos Lopez (genete) - genet...@gmail.com - Official at the Andalusian
Government (Junta de Andalucia http://www.juntadeandalucia.es)
2007 - today
In the past held the position of project leader and lead developer but stepped
out for personal reasons. He is still active as code contributor now.
Konstanin Dimitriev (zelgadis) - ksee.zelga...@gmail.com - Unemployed/Freelancer
2008 - today
Project leader and maintainer. Code contributor.
Yu Chen (jcome) - jco...@gmail.com - Software application engineer at
Esko (http://esko.com)
2008 - today
Code contributor (UI).
Jeróme Blanchi (d.j.a.y.) - d.j....@free.fr - Unemployed/Freelancer
2011 - today
Code contributor, documentation.
Ivan Mahoin (blackwarthog) - b...@icystar.com - Unemployed/Freelancer
2013 - today
Community-funded full-time developer.
David Rylander (rylleman) - da...@rylanderanimation.com - Freelancing
professional animator
2009 - today
Project assistant.
For complete list of credits there is a code contribution statistics here:
http://goo.gl/OhWZG4
*** Please include any other pertinent information not given above that
you feel we should review with your application.
Synfig Studio is an unique open source animation tool, which is seriously
considered as growing alternative to proprietary commercial tools like Adobe
Flash, Anime Studio, ToonBoom or Adobe After Effects. In order to keep the
growing we need a strong organisation behind our back, which will support our
efforts.
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.
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