Blogs

Over the weekend, I submitted the Nitobi Contributor Agreement to the PhoneGap mailing list and created a minor sh!t-storm.  I did a few things wrong and as a result it became obvious that our intent was left unclear. This post is my attempt at reaching clarity.

Many of the things we at Nitobi were accused of attempting with this agreement are precisely the things we are attempting to prevent.

• The document was mis-titled and very misleading, it reads “Nitobi Creative Commons Contributor Agreement”, when it should have been titled, “PhoneGap Contributor Agreement”.  The actual document itself is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, not PhoneGap!
• I was not clear enough in informing everyone that the license for PhoneGap is NOT changing,  and it will continue to be MIT licensed.  The agreement is being put in place to protect that.
• Contributors are NOT giving up their rights, or blindly assigning their rights to Nitobi, they are agreeing to SHARE their rights with Nitobi.  Contributors give up nothing and are free to do what they want with their own submissions, short of revoking the rights they have granted to Nitobi. There is NO danger that contributions can be made exclusively proprietary.
• The agreement implies that mailing list conversations are covered, or this is how some readers interpreted it.  This is absolutely NOT true: the mailing list, wiki and likewise PhoneGap documentation are not covered by this (or any) agreement, and we will be updating the agreement to make this obvious.

So to repeat, as clearly as possible: PhoneGap is and will remain under the MIT license and be freely available for use in your applications ( for fun OR profit ).  You do not need to sign anything to use PhoneGap in your applications, you just need to agree to the MIT license.  Only those wishing to contribute back to the project ( via checkin to the repository ) will need to sign the agreement.

As always, we remain committed to Open Source and the community surrounding it, and will work with the community to do the right thing.

If you wish to comment on the agreement, or PhoneGap please feel free to do so in the group mailing list. http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap/

Nitobi/PhoneGap dev Fil Maj tweeted the other day about this excellent tutorial from Aziz Uysal, describing how to get the BlackBerry SDK and simulator up and running on OS X, for which it has no official support. Using some Eclipse skills and Wine magic, you can pull up the simulator and enjoy all the benefits of BlackBerry dev without booting up a VM.

If you want to run PhoneGap-BlackBerry in this environment, it’s trivially easy. Here’s how:

1. Do everything it says in the tutorial, until you can run a Hello World app in the simulator
2. Clone the PhoneGap-Blackberry repo
3. File -> Import… -> General, Existing Projects into Workspace, then Next
4. Under Select root directory, select /whatever_your_path_is/phonegap-blackberry/framework/ and then select PhoneGap in the Projects field below
5. Add an index.html file to the src/www directory.
6. Open build.xml for editing. Change the jde.home and simulator.home properties to match your simulator location (if you follow Aziz’s tutorial, you can copy these properties from the build.xml of that project). Edit the load-simulator tag (<target name="load-simulator">) to match the other build.xml file also
7. Drag build.xml into the app view (as detailed in Aziz’s tutorial). Then double-click on load-simulator
8. Hit Menu (next to the green button), then Downloads, then PhoneGap
9. Hrrm… ??????????
10. Profit!

Thanks to Aziz for writing such a great tutorial – now we just need someone to get XCode running on Windows 7!

Edit: This tutorial was previous referenced on the PhoneGap mailing list by John Britton – I wasn’t aware until he brought it up in a later message. Thanks for bringing this to our attention John.