| 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
Developing and distributing QT applications for Nokia… not yet!Posted on May 4, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under apple, nokia, phonegap, qt, technology This information was posted to Phonegap Google groups also. Next N900 release (PR1.2) will include QT 4 in the default install. It has been delayed due to various problems observed in the leaked beta. Also, N8 will be the first device supporting Qt out of the box. It is not shipping yet. Nokia Qt SDK should allow unified Qt apps for Symbian and Meego:
It is not yet possible to deploy Qt apps through OVI store, so targeting third party apps to Nokia Qt is kind of pointless. If you need to develop to Nokia using a web framework, don’t rely on native QT Webkit, but target to Nokia WRT instead. Nokia bought Qt in January 2008. It has taken over two years to ship the first Qt enabled mobile phone. Meanwhile, Apple has released App Store and risen to be the leading smartphone provider with its iPhone…. talk about slow development and the lack of leadership. So the hype around “QT will solve everything” is still just hype… they still don’t have nothing solid out there.
Why C# / Javascript will be allowed and Flash won’t be as App Store programming languagePosted on April 13, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, apple, iphone, phonegap All the Flash developers of the world wet their pants on 8th April 2010 when Apple announced that Flash based application won’t be approved in the Apple’s App Store. This essentially destroyed the easy opportunity to monetize existing Flash development skills and the huge Adobe expansion potential into mobile markets, pissing a lot of folks who had bet on Adobe’s technology, leading developers’ rage on Internet forums. Bad news for those who had already building iPhone apps on Flash CS5 even before it was released… Unfortunately it was not only Adobe and Flash who got in the line of fire: popular frameworks like Appcelerator, Unity 3D and Monotouch apps are theoretically excluded to enter App Store by the new developer agreement which states that the original source code of the application must be C, C++, Objective-C or WebKit/Javascript. I belive Apple does not hate certain programming languages. Apple does not either want to force you to use their development tools. Only by understanding what Apple really meant with the infamous 3.3.1 clause in the developer agreement, we can start building a bridge to get MonoTouch et. al. to be Apple’s favorites again. History of Flash (Lite)Adobe (Macromedia) and Flash have been into mobile business far before iPhone was published. The thing is called Flash Lite run-time. It runs on billions of phones. The problem of Flash Lite is that it does not very well integrate with its host environment. It does not even have so simple user interface component as a “menu” out of the box. Which means that every developer must create their own menu implementation. Which means that there exist hundreds of shitty Flash Lite menu implementations out there, each behaving differently and each not resembling the native menu component. This is not a very nice thing if you consider the user experience of the application and iPhone is all about user experience. Note that this is not so big thing for games, as games have radically different user experience anyway. Flash does not communicate with its host platform either. You wouldn’t be able to access native API features even if you fully controlled the deployment environment of Flash application, as Flash is a binary blob into which you cannot plug-in more parts. There even exists a product for mobile Flash whose sole purpose is circumvent the limitations of Flash by using a localhost TCP/IP socket connection and a native server application. If developers choose Flash they choose to lock themselves into Flash and what Adobe gives for them. This crippling of your platform potential with Flash is not limited to Flash Lite and mobile. I have personal experiences from a project done with Adobe Air for Windows. We wisely chose Adobe Air as a desktop application development platform, because it would guarantee the future portability of our code. However, this nice idea did not really interest in the point when we noticed that we e.g. couldn’t control how File Open dialogs behave (file mask, remember start folder, etc.), severely reducing the user experience of the application. So, Steve Jobs definitely is on something when he says “intermediary translation or compatibility layer” is bad for your platform. Note that the same limitation concerns Java ME also. Desktop Java has JNI interface for building extensions, but mobile Java doesn’t. How other frameworks differ from FlashLet’s take a MonoTouch for example. MonoTouch is Novell’s open source Mono project based development tool which allows you to create iPhone applications in C# language. Compared to Objective C, development using MonoTouch has several advantages for certain audience: you don’t need to learn new programming language, C# is closer to traditional Java/C++ languages than Objective-C, you can leverage the full potential of existing C# ecosystem out there, the standard library has more functionality and of course, it is easier to port the core of the application from a platform to another. Note that the porting part concerns core i.e. application logic only. MonoTouch does not try to separate you from Apple’s platform. It does not reinvent platform services or user interface building blocks, or force something like Windows user interface into your shiny iPhone. In fact, MonoTouch seamlessly integrates with Apple’s platform. You even need to use Apple’s own Interface Builder tool to create user interfaces, which will be exposed to MonoTouch’s C# code. Binding with native API is breeze: below ten lines of code guaranteeing that whenever Apple releases a new platform feature it will be instantly available for all MonoTouch developers. MonoTouch embraces the platform. You can pick Objective C or C# depending on taste. The resulting source code is similar in idea, different in syntax. There is no “compatibility layer” so to say. Not even technically, as C# is compiled to native ARM binary. There is no way how a person could distinguish a MonoTouch application from an application build using Objective-C. Open source philosophy and platformsAppcelerator, PhoneGap and other open source / Javascript frameworks are also protected from Apple’s wrath. They are open source which means that you can tap the full potential Apple’s development platform as long as someones writes a little binding code. Also, they try to use native look and feel and components as much as possible, just to make the applications slick. The frameworks do not have conflicting interest with Apple; the frameworks provide portability to a certain point, but they do this respecting their master. Flash does not enjoy this freedom; developers can’t change Flash or venture outside Flash’s sandbox. The FutureThere is no point of technically counter App Store’s developer agreement, like saying “hey I’ll just compile all my Flash source code to C so it is C code.” It’s Apple’s game. Apple can do anything they wish and they can also change the developer agreement. So when Apple sees something happening in its ecosystem which might damage it, it simply pulls the rug under your feet again. But Apple can also change the agreement in a positive way. PhoneGap has already went through process of becoming App Store approved framework once. I hope that development communities will not burn its bridges with Apple, but try to communicate this matter with a meaningful manner and come to a development agreement resolution based on ideas given in this blog post. Below is my proposition (IANAL. It is left to the reader to come up with something smarter): 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be written using Apple’s guidelines and best practices to express Apple’s intend how the application should behave. iPhone is not a monopoly. You are free to build and run your Flash application on a device like N900 on any day and sell it in Nokia’s OVI store. If this is a problem for your business then maybe you should reconsider your business model to be less iPhone centric and promote heterogenicity of mobile platforms and application stores. Until Flash is fixed so that you can mix-in native code, instead of it being a barrier between the expression and the hosting platform, I find it unlikely any company based their reputation around the user experience would allow Flash on their platform.
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:
Building a mobile site and applications with Django and PythonPosted on September 30, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, django, iphone, linux, mobile, pys60, python, technology Recently we created a mobile site for an interactive bicycle tour. oulugo.mobi (you need to use mobile browser to access the site or you’ll get a redirect) is a multimedia enriched bicycle tour through the historic parts of the city of Oulu. All content is provided by OnGo. The route, which you can bicycle through is drawn on Google Maps. There are nine action points where the user can listen to streaming audio clips, with still images, in his/her mobile phone. This is sort of augmented reality experience: The user sees the real world (where he/she is now bicycling) combined with the historic events (audio playback narrative). For example, at Linnansaari (a location on the route) you’ll see the actual 17th century castle ruins and the narrator tells how the castle exploded when fire, caused by a lighting, reached gunpowder warehouse… boom. The explosion caused stones fly over 400 meters. Alternatively, the clips are available as podcasts from Oulu Tourism pages. You can download them into your iPod for offline listening and use in conjuction with a paper map. This demostrates interesting mix of multichannel publishing: paper, web, mobile and podcasts. The tour is bilingual in Finnish and English. There exists unreleased iPhone application, based on PhoneGap, which allows the user to track his/her location real-time on the web page. We didn’t see it worth of trouble to go through Apple iPhone application review process. When location based service support comes for the browser this feature is indended to be included as the standard HTML5 feature of the service. There also exists Nokia Series 60 mobile application, based on PyS60 and Series 60 BrowserControl API, which allows the user to track his/her location in real-time. The application provides wrapper around Series 60 WebKit control and allows Javascript to access phone native functions (GPS) over localhost socket communication. Like with Apple, we didn’t see real-time tracking feature interesting enough to go through Symbian Signed process to get our application released. Also, BrowserControl had seriousquality problems and we didn’t consider it stable enough for the end users. Some work is available in PyS60 Community Edition repository. The service is hosted on Python specific virtual server on Twinapex services server farm. Features
Software stack
Development effortDevelopment time: Around 100 hours. Three different developers where involved. Used development tools: Eclipse, PyDev, Subclipse, Subversion. There were around five meetings between the content provider and the technology provider. Few beta testing rounds using iPhone application were performed by bicycling in -10 celcius degrees weather (north and so on…). No polar bears were harmed during the creation of this mobile service. The service is linked in from Oulu Tourism pages and thousands of paper brochures printed for Oulu summer season 2009. About the author Mikko Ohtamaa |
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