On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Luke Welling WMF <lwelling(a)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