INFRA-15891: Add badge to travis and a nice github page
git-svn-id: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/creadur/rat/trunk@1821323 13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1d6365f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+# Apache Rat
+
+[](https://travis-ci.org/apache/creadur-rat)
+
+## What is RAT?
+
+Apache Rat is developed by the Apache Creadur project of the Apache Software
+Foundation. Join us at https://creadur.apache.org and read more about Apache Rat
+at https://creadur.apache.org/rat.
+
+*Release Audit Tool (Rat)* is a tool to improve accuracy and efficiency when checking
+releases. It is heuristic in nature: making guesses about possible problems. It
+will produce false positives and cannot find every possible issue with a release.
+It's reports require interpretation.
+
+Rat was developed in response to a need felt in the Apache Incubator to be able to
+review releases for the most common faults less labour intensively. It is therefore
+highly tuned to the Apache style of releases.
+
+Rat is intended to be self documenting: reports should include introductory material
+describing their function. Building Rat describes how to run Rat. Running Rat
+describes the options available. These release notes describe the current state of
+Rat.
+
+A good way to use Rat is to through the source. This allows the code base to be
+easily patched for example to add new generated file matchers. The main jar is
+runnable and self-documenting. This jar is available as a standard alone binary.
+
+Rat includes a task library for Ant 1.7. This allows Rat reports to be run against
+a wide variety of resources. See ant-task-examples.xml. To use the Ant tasks,
+Apache Ant 1.7 is required. See https://ant.apache.org/.
+
+For Maven builds, the plugin is recommended.
+
+In response to demands from project quality tool developers, Rat is available as a
+library (rat-lib jar) suitable for inclusion in tools. Note that binary compatibility
+is not guaranteed between 0.x releases. The XML output format is not yet in it's
+final form and so library users are recommended to either use the supplied
+stylesheets or keep in close touch with the code.
+
+## License
+
+ Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
+ contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
+ this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
+ The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
+ (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
+ the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
+
+ http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+ Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+ distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+ WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+ See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+ limitations under the License.
