I don't see the purpose of adding a licence string back on to JavaScript
post-minification. Any recipient wanting to create a derivative work or
redistribute those files is going to go back to the much more readable
source files.
It would be good form to add licence information to all the JS files in the
same way we do for all the PHP files. Many or all of them are missing that
now. Given they have a consistent licence, making that clear in each file
is just grunt work.
I don't see the need for that to survive minificaiton though. If somebody
wants to auto verify licence status with software, they can run it on the
original JS source before it get's minified. As others have implied
regardless of whether you think satisfying the FSF is important, satisfying
an automated tool is a concern that can be delegated to the tool owner.
The licence status of on wiki user JavaScript is a separate issue, and
possibly much more complicated. CC-BY-SA-3.0 is not an ideal licence for
software, and it seems likely that there will be code pasted into some
user JavaScript pages that is licensed under an incompatible licence.
Luke Welling
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org>wrote;wrote:
On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 12:56:23PM +0100, Alexander
Berntsen wrote:
GNU LibreJS blocks several Javascript sources
around Wikipedia. I was
sent to this list by Kirk Billund. My issue as well as Kirk's replies
follows. I hope you are okay to read it in this form.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36866
We have this issue reported, it's on our radar, and I, at least, intend to
fix it in the future.
The user JavaScript and CSS might be an issue. I'm not sure how to handle
that. I guess we could indicate in the license headers that some parts of
the code are under the CC-BY-SA license, or whatever is set to the default
license for the wiki. That should be possible, if not trivial.
The minification process, however, does *not* cause a problem. We can
simply add the comments to the file(s) after the minification. It does mean
we'll need to include, potentially, multiple license headers in one HTTP
response, but that shouldn't cause much issue. Alternatively we could use a
"mixed" license header, and link to the texts of multiple licenses, or link
to multiple files' source code.
See the linked bug (above) for more discussion of the technical problems
presented, and a few proposed suggestions. It looks like the best way to do
it would be the "bang comment" syntax, suggested by Timo (Krinkle), which
would allow each script to be tagged on its own, and that way each script
authour would be responsible for their own licensing.
I hope that helps, and that the bug discussion is a little more kind than
wikitech has seemed :)
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
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