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Watir Project Application to Software Freedom Conservancy
For previous versions of the application see Charley’s, Bret’s and Željko’s gists.
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.
Watir, pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for
automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read
and maintain. It is simple and flexible.
Watir drives browsers the same way people do. It clicks links, fills in forms,
presses buttons. Watir also checks results, such as whether expected text
appears on the page.
Watir is a family of Ruby libraries but it supports your app no matter what
technology it is developed in. They support Internet Explorer on Windows,
Firefox, Chrome and Opera on Windows, Mac and Linux and Safari on Mac.
- 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 project is based on the BSD Open Source License template as listed by the
OSI. Our license can be found at:
https://github.com/watir/watir/blob/master/LICENSE
- Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the
project, including both code and community plans.
We met in April 2011 and developed plans for improving the functionality of
Watir-Webdriver and increasing the compatibility between Watir-Webdriver and
Watir. These plans have been largely implemented.
The Watir team and community are meeting in March 23-24 in Austin, Texas to
develop additional plans for the project.
- Please give us the main link to the projects primary website.
Our main site is located at http://watir.com, we also have a wiki with
additional information at: http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Project+Home
- Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or
checkout.
https://github.com/watir/watir
https://github.com/watir/watir-webdriver
https://github.com/watir/watirspec
Original Project Site (Historical Purposes)
http://rubyforge.org/projects/wtr/
- 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?
Bret Pettichord: Hosting CI servers, Watir Day event (April 2011)
Zeljko Filipin: receiving donations for Watir project at flattr.com
- 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?
We currently have a contract with the Northcross Convention Center for our event
in March 2012. We have given them a deposit of $1,500.
- 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?
Not really. In 2008-2009, Software Research, Inc (www.soft.com) sent a letter to
Watircraft LLC informing it of certain patents that it held on technology
relating to Watir. The letter made no explicit accusations.
- 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.
Watir is fairly old project. According to github.com, the first commit
containing Ruby code was made in October 2003. The code was first in CVS, then
was ported to SVN and then Git. From RubyForge it moved to SVN repository at
OpenQA and now is Git repository at GitHub.
In January 2005 the first version of Watir (1.0.1) was released as a zip file.
RubyGems did not exist back then.
Watir 1.4.1 (August 2005) was a big success, downloaded almost 45k times. That
was also the first version that was available as both a gem and exe file.
Watir gem is now hosted at RubyGems.org. Watir gem is not the only gem
included in the Watir project, there are also firewatir, commonwatir,
safariwatir, celerity, watir-webdriver. There used to be chromewatir gem too,
but it is replaced with watir-webdriver.
There is one fork of Watir project, Vapir. Ethan (he never said his last
name) created a fork in May 2010. It does not look active.
Watir project is consisted of a few gems.
The project started with watir gem (the whole project was named after it). It
can only drive Internet Explorer on Windows.
The next gem that appeared was firewatir. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and
drives Firefox, but only up to Firefox 3.6. The gem is deprecated since Watir
2.0 and replaced by watir-webdriver gem.
After it came safariwatir. It drives Safari, but only on Mac. There is no
Windows version. Safariwatir is not in active development.
For a short period of time, there was chromewatir gem. It was able to drive
Chrome, but only on Windows. It is replaced by watir-webdriver gem.
Celerity is the only gem that does not drive a real browser, but it emulates
one. It is not in active development.
Watir-webdriver gem uses WebDriver (part of Selenium project) to drive browsers.
It works on Windows, Mac and Linux and can drive Internet Explorer, Firefox,
Chrome and Opera.
Operawatir is the newest gem. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux and can drive
Opera. It needs JRuby to run. It is replaced by watir-webdriver gem.
The success of Watir project has inspired people to create similar projects
using different programming languages:
WatiN, .NET Framework, http://watin.org/
Watij, Java, http://watij.com/
Win32-Watir, Perl, http://search.cpan.org/dist/Win32-Watir/
win-control, Gambit (Lisp/Scheme), http://code.google.com/p/win-control/
WatiN and Watij are active projects. Win32-Watir and win-control are not in
active development.
Watir had healthy community from the beginning. It had a mailing list, wiki, web
site, bug tracker and IRC channel from the early days. Recently significan
amount of support has moved to Stack Overflow. We also have Watir podcast.
A lot of people are blogging about Watir and we have a list of frequent bloggers
at our web site. Several articles have been written for pring magazines. People
are giving Watir related talks at conferences and meet-ups. We even organized a
few conferences specifically about Watir: AWTA in Austin, Texas (2000-2009);
Watir Day in San Francisco, California (2011); viaqa Watir Day in Zagreb,
Croatia (2011). We have Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts and LinkedIn
group.
- Please explain how your project is governed. Who makes the decisions
in the project? How do you resolve disputes, particularly about
non-code issues?
The Watir Team resolves decisions for the project.
The membership is detailed here. http://watir.com/team/
Current members are:
- Bret Pettichord
- Charley Baker
- Jari Bakken
- Jarmo Pertman
- Hugh McGowan
- Andreas Tolf Tolfson
- Alister Scott
- Chuck van der Linden
- Zeljko Filipin
Most decisions are resolved by community process. When needed, a majority of the
Watir team can make decisions affecting the 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?
- 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.
Watir runs on Linux-based, MacOSX and Windows-based systems. We aren’t currently
packaged with any Linux distributions, but available as a set of gems for Ruby.
Watir gems are available by doing a “gem install” from Ruby, gems are located
on Rubygems.org, the primary gem server for Ruby projects.
- 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.
The Watir project has depended over the years on hosting resources from
OpenQA.org, RubyForge, Github and Wordpress.
WatirCraft LLC funded Bret Pettichord’s time on Watir development in 2008.
- 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)?
Since moving to RubyGems.org, there have been 79,410 downloads of watir
(http://rubygems.org/gems/watir) and 47,913 downloads of watir-webdriver
(http://rubygems.org/gems/watir-webdriver).
The Watir General mailing list has 2,219 members and
22,654 messages (http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general).
These figures are from 1/2/2012.
There are more than 500 Watir related questions at Stack Overflow.
- 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.
Our current team page lists the most active contributors and developers for
Watir: http://watir.com/team/
More detailed information:
Bret Pettichord bret@pettichord.com – Director, Watir, workplace: Convio –
active: 2003-2011
Charley Baker charley.baker@gmail.com – Lead Developer, Watir, workplace:
self-employed active: 2005-2011
Angrez Singh angrez@gmail.com – Lead Developer, FireWatir, workplace:
Proteans Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd, active: 2005-2010
Jari Bakken jari.bakken@gmail.com – Contributor, Watir, Lead Developer,
Watir-Webdriver, workplace: FINN.no, active 2008-2011
Jarmo Pertman jarmo.p@gmail.com – Developer, Watir, workplace:
active: 2010-2011
Zeljko Filipin zeljko.filipin@gmail.com, Community Manager, owner of
watirpodcast.com and testingpodcast.com, writing Watir book,
workplace: WA Research SA, active: 2005-2011
Alister Scott alister.scott@gmail.com, Web Master, Watir, workplace:
ThoughtWorks, active: 2007-2011
Tiffany Fodor tcfodor@comcast.net, Community Support, workplace: self-employed,
active: 2007-2011
Paul Rogers paul.rogers@shaw.ca, Developer, Watir, workplace:
active: 2004-2008
Jonathan Kohl jonathan@kohl.ca, Documentation, Watir, workplace: self-employed
consultant, active: 2004-2005
Dave Hoover dave@obtiva.com, Creator, SafariWatir, workplace: Obtiva,
active 2006-2009
Sai Venkatakrishnan saidesertrose2004@gmail.com, Creator, ChromeWatir,
FlashWatir, workplace: ThoughtWorks, active: 2008-2010
<<Would be good to go through the commit logs and see if there were other frequent contributors over the years. Seems like there were some, but maybe they were more than 5 years ago.>>
- Please include any other pertinent information not given above that
you feel we should review with your application.
N/A
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.