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@member.fsf.orgwrote:
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@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
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