The licence
MIT. Use it at work, sell what you build with it, fork it, relicense your fork. Keep the copyright line and the permission notice in copies of the source, and accept that there is no warranty. The full text is in LICENSE at the root of the repository and it is twenty lines long.
Contributing
Open an issue before writing code. Most patches that arrive unannounced are refused, not because they are bad but because they add something the tool has decided not to do, and refusing work already done is worse for everybody than refusing an idea.
- One change per pull request, with a test in
tests/when the change affects output. make checkpasses before you open it.- Commit messages say what changed and why, in the imperative.
- No new dependencies. A patch that adds one is refused on that ground alone.
Documentation fixes, fixture ledgers from real-world edge cases and reports of platforms where the build fails are more useful than features, and are merged faster.
Code of conduct
Be civil, assume the other person is trying, and keep the discussion about the code. Personal attacks, harassment and persistent bad faith get one warning and then a ban from the tracker and the chat room.
Reports go to conduct@example.com, which reaches two maintainers and nobody else. A report is answered within a week. The person reported is told what was reported and by whom only if the reporter agrees. Maintainers are held to the same rules and a report about a maintainer is handled by the other two.
How decisions are made
Three maintainers, one vote each, majority decides, and any of the three may block a change to the file format outright. Everything is decided in the open on the issue tracker; the chat room decides nothing.
Requests to add a feature are answered with yes or no, usually no, and the reasons are written in the issue rather than in a private message. Declined issues are kept open in a wontfix list so the same request can be pointed at an answer rather than argued again.
There is no governance document beyond these four paragraphs, and no plan to elect anybody.
Funding
There is none. Nobody is paid, there is no donation button, no sponsor tier, no company behind it and no foundation. The three of us maintain it in evenings we can spare, and in the weeks we cannot spare any, nothing happens and nobody is owed an explanation.
Costs are a domain name and a file host, about forty a year, split three ways. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes with it.
If you want to support the project, the useful currencies are a good bug report, a reproducible test case, and patience with an answer that takes a fortnight.