A step in the right direction
At my current workplace, on a particular project we have not been allowed to use third party libraries, due to fears of licensing issues if and when we come to sell the product. The project is predominantly for the business, but it would be nice if we could convert the product into something we could market.
Despite multiple discussions and suggesting to management that open source software licensed under an MIT or BSD license would not have any implications, they would not have it. This has meant writing pretty much everything we need from scratch.
Recently, the managing director must have noticed the improved the user experience the little bit of JavaScript we use brings to the product. In previous conversations, I’ve mentioned to the MD that JavaScript is an area that the development team has little experience with, and this seems to have nudged him into letting us use a third party library or tool kit within the product. I spent a bit of time reviewing some of the frameworks and tool kits out there and basically boiled down to going with Dojo. Most of the frameworks reviewed provide similar features, Dojo came up on top because of the BSD license, recent announcement of a partnership with the Zend Framework and the added bonus of contributors having to sign a CLA. Looking forward to getting stuck into it and making our application a little easier on the eye.
The next task is to go about documenting the best way to include and use the tool kit in our application, will write about it if I get chance.
Tags: dojo, javascript, licensing, Open Source
July 16th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I hope your management has no concerns about Zend Framework’s licensing. It is very similar to Dojo’s and also requires signed CLA’s from all contributors. In fact, Dojo’s licensing and CLA policy made it one of the few JS toolkits that we could even consider shipping with ZF. It was just a happy coincidence that we also consider it the best JS toolkit. ;)
I’m very happy to hear that the Dojo’s CLA is making adoption of FOSS easier in your workplace; this is one thing we were definitely hoping to do with the ZF CLA.
Best!
,Wil
July 16th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Cheers Wil, I know about the Licensing for the Zend Framework and I’ve already got my trainee developers using it for their mini projects. Now we’ve broken the ice with Dojo, it’s only a matter of time before I sneak ZF in to our main product!
Another good thing is that having spoke to my direct manager, we’ll be looking to sign corporate CLAs and give back bug fixes at the very least.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Dave — you may be interested to know that the Dojo integration in ZF is now complete and in trunk. It makes it ridiculously easy to dojo-enable your forms, as well as utilize dojo’s layout widgets. Perhaps the time savings coupled with the licensing will sway your manager. :)