On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Luke Welling WMF lwelling@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
I think this makes the most sense. Files that don't have licenses should have them, and they'd be shown in non-minified mode.
Serving license headers in minified mode is kind of silly (it defeats part of the point)--and I think that "web labels" idea is equally silly.
-Chad