Phonegap contributor agreement | February 1st, 2010
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/