| Plone 4 released – the best open source CMS of 2010?Posted on September 1, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under plone, technology The long awaited version 4 of enterprise grade Plone CMS has been released.
Vote Plone 4 release news on reddit. Yeah, yeah… it is a linkadvertisement
Open source contribution agreement templatePosted on August 24, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under open source, phonegap, python, technology We are looking for creating contribution agreements for few new open source projects. IANAL, but hiring a real lawyer is freaking expensive. The thing is that we, us a company, want to guarantee that all code coming into the project is “clean”. We also want to guarantee our right to change the license in the future (GPL -> BSD, GPL -> Apache, etc.) Thus far, the best free, as in freedom and in beer, contribution agreement template we have found is Sun Contribution Agreement 1.5 which is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. It is at least used by high profile Phonegap project (Nitobi as the company) if you don’t count OpenSolaris anymore as open source project. IANAL, but if I understood correctly, the agreement basically says
Since I couldn’t find the orignal document in editable form (PDF was the best I could get) I made OpenOffice.org ODS document out of it with easily replaceable identification information. Comments welcome. The agreement text pasted below. YOURPROJECT Contributor Agreement
These terms apply to your contribution of materials to the YOURCOMPANY ("us"/"our"), and set out the intellectual property rights you grant to us in the contributed materials. If this contribution is on behalf of a company, the term "you" will also mean the company you identify below. If you agree to be bound by these terms, fill in the information requested below and provide your signature.
Read this agreement carefully before signing.
1. The term "contribution" means any source code, object code, patch, tool, sample, graphic, specification, manual, documentation, or any other material posted or submitted by you to the project.
2. With respect to any worldwide copyrights, or copyright applications and registrations, in your contribution:
you assign to us joint ownership through this document, and to the extent that such assignment is or becomes invalid, ineffective or unenforceable, through this document you grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other licensing arrangements;
you agree that each of us can do all things in relation to your contribution as if each of us were the sole owners, and if one of us makes a derivative work of your contribution, the one who makes the derivative work (or has it made) will be the sole owner of that derivative work;
you agree that you will not assert any moral rights in your contribution against us, our licensees or transferees;
you agree that we may register a copyright in your contribution and exercise all ownership rights associated with it; and
you agree that neither of us has any duty to consult with, obtain the consent of, pay, or give an accounting to the other for any use or distribution of your contribution.
3. With respect to any patents you own, or that you can license without payment to any third party, through this document you grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free license to:
make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise transfer your contribution in whole or in part, alone or in combination with or included in any product, work or materials arising out of the project to which your contribution was submitted, and
at our option, to sublicense these same rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other licensing arrangements.
4. Except as set out above, you keep all right, title, and interest in your contribution. The rights that you grant to us under these terms are effective on the date you first submitted a contribution to us, even if your submission took place before the date you sign these terms. Any contribution we make available under any license will also be made available under a Free Culture (as defined by http://freedomdefined.org) or Free Software/Open Source licence (as defined and approved by the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative).
5. With respect to your contribution, you represent that it is an original work and that you can legally grant the rights set out in these terms;
it does not to the best of your knowledge violate any third party's copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other intellectual property rights; and
you are authorized to sign this contract on behalf of your company (if identified below).
6. The place of performance is the registered seat of
YOURCOMPANYNAME
YOURCOMPANYADDRESS1
YOURCOMPANYADDRESS2
YOURCOUNTRY
YOURCOMPANYBUSINESSID
Any disputes concerning this agreement including the issue of its valid conclusion and its pre and past contractual effects are exclusively decided by the competent court in YOURHOMECITY, YOURCOUNTRY or, at our discretion, also by the competent court is whose district you may have your residence, your registered seat, an establishment or assets.
If available, please list your YOURPROJECT username(s) for the YOURPROJECT systems.
Username(s): __________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
Your contact information (Please print clearly)
Your name: ____________________________________________________________________
Your company's name (if applicable): __________________________________________
Mailing address: ______________________________________________________________
Telephone, Fax and Email: _____________________________________________________
Your signature: _______________________________________________________________
Date: _________________________________________________________________________
To complete this agreement:
email a scanned copy of a signed agreement to
fax a signed copy to + .....; or
post a signed copy to:
YOURCOPMANYNAME
YOURCOMPANYADDRESS1
YOURCOMPANYADDRESS2
YOURCOUNTRY
This agreement is based on version 1.5 of the Sun Contributor Agreement, which
can be found at:
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/contributor_agreement.jsp
This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Zoho integration for Python and Plone CMSPosted on July 18, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under plone, python, technology, zoho Zoho is a web application provider competing with Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Live. Zoho provides a very wide set of browser based applications from text editing and spreadsheets to project management and customer relationship management (highlighted items should ring a bell for small software development companies). Especially the last one, CRM, is a very attractive deal as you get a hosted complex CRM application with API services for very affordable or free price. Small organizations are not necessarily rich enough to go for Salesforce API supported edition which would be 135 € / month / user. mFabrik has been working on Zoho Python bindings as we use Zoho internally. Zoho API is HTTP GET/POST based.
mfabrik.zoho is a GPL’ed Python library which provides basic facilities for Zoho API calls. Currently the feature set is very CRM weighted, though it can be easily expanded for other Zoho applications. mfabrik.plonezohointegration is a Plone CMS add-on product which marry Plone and Zoho together. The add-on provides a control panel where you can enter Zoho API key details for Plone. Forms for CRM lead generation are provided as standalone and as a portlet (you can see them in action on our web and blog site). The source is hosted on Github, so you can easily start tailoring it for your own organization needs. I happily accept all merge requests, providing that unit tests for new features are included. If you do not feel comfortable with Python programming, but still want to integrate Zoho to your systems, please contact us for further help.
Cross-platform mobile application development and paymentsPosted on September 30, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under android, blackberry, html5, iphone, javascript, locationing, payment, series 60, symbian, technology We have been piloting multi-platform mobile application development and payments in few client projects. Target platforms usually include iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia Series 60. Also there are two notable usual cases which need to be specially handled
Sounds easy, right? Well it isn’t… Below are some notes for our due diligence work which you fellow developers might find interesting. SDKsMobile phone vendors are jealously and don’t want to co-operate with each other. Building application which works in all handsets is major headache. We found some reasonable candidates for cross-platform mobile development doing HTML and Javascript. HTML and Javascript pages are converted to native application using a wrapper technology (a.k.a. appaccelerator). Doing Flash Lite or Java ME can be pretty much forgotten nowadays as they won’t run on the most hyped platform, iPhone. Flash Lite has poor support for anything except content authoring due to primitive and limited APIs. Java ME provides horrible user experience. (X)HTML is the only common language spoken by mobile phones. Thus, there has been a rise of “appaccelerators”, technologies which allow to create mobile applications with HTML(5) and Javascript.
All these wrap the browser component (WebKit) and provide some extra Javascript APIs when your web pages as executed under the application mode.
Rhomobile has little different use cases from the rest of the bunch as it provides client-side programming using Ruby and less focuses on Javascript/web applications. Payments and in-application purchasesThere are four major way to do mobile payments “inside” the application for bought content and subscriptions. The price tag on the application itself is left out on this discussion as the application stores themselves take care of it.
App Store payment is the most attractive as it provides the best end user experience. It allows you to use App Store payment mechanism inside the application. It is safe and no need to hassle with external payment providers. However, App Store payment can be used only for content consumed directly inside the application. You cannot use it e.g. for ordering a pizza. I think this might be related to recent EU legislation forbidding SMS payments for services not consumed in the phone itself. SMS payment is ok for little payments. Operators take big cut of the revenue, generally 30% – 70% depending on the country. Short code fees usually start from 500€ set-up fee + 500€ / month. SMS cannot be often send as a background, but the user is presented the normal SMS editor which reduces the user experience somehow. For credit card payments there exists several providers. Credit card has the cheapest entry fees, but the downside is that the user needs to have the credit card. This excludes teenager audience. Direct operator payments are not very well supported yet globally. Most western operators support them. The operator also takes a big share and the fixed fee is pretty high. My favorite payment provider thus far is Bango which provides credit card payment starting 9€ / mo. and scales up to worldwide SMS payments which cost few grannies per month. In most cases, the payment experience will not be smooth. You need to open the phone main browser on the payment provider page to do the payment. This usually will close your own application. Rarely you can do the payment inside the application and support multiple platforms. After doing the payment most platforms allow you to close the browse and reopen your application using a special URL handler. Wikipedia mobile payments page is also useful. Image upload<input type=”file”> won’t work on iPhone and some other platforms as those don’t have user browsable file system. Also the file dialog usually doens’t have image preview making it useless. Phonegap has a branch which supports images picking using iPhone’s own gallery browser. In any case, there is not yet cross-platform solution for this. Future prospectsIn some time-frame we will get rid of the need to wrap HTML applications natively as the web browser applications will support all HTML5 features without extensions and probably have some proprietary extensions for mobile specific features like SMS. We already have had some taste for this:
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