My apologies for not weighing in earlier. I'm actually subscribed to the list (no need to cc me) but have been extremely busy with... well, among other things, hiring someone to free me up to do more things like this. :)

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:59 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

On 25 April 2013 00:36, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:

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On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:

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Says who? I do not believe this is a requirement. It perhaps would be nice, if done sanely, but not a requirement.

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Says the GPL. To be specific:

I understand Luis was working on sane ways to do this in minified JS (and whether it is in fact required, or that counts as a compiled binary; though obviously it would be nice). So AIUI we're waiting on him.

Suffice to say that GPL was never designed or drafted with this use case in mind, making all the usual disclaimers about the difficulty of GPL interpretation even stronger. Frankly, I don't see much benefit to spending list cycles arguing about the precise meaning.[1][2]

With that as background, I think it would be compatible with our mission/culture, and with some interpretations of the license, to provide licensing information (including links to relevant source code) for any embedded third-party javascript as part of a default MW install. If the solution for that also provides relevant information on the non-minified-javascript parts of the source code base, that would be a terrific side effect.

In a nutshell, there are two primary approaches to doing this (not necessarily either-or):

* Add licensing information to About:Version or something similar. Obviously some of this is already there (general GPL v2 license statement) but having per-extension information, and in particular ensuring that any extension with javascript has the necessary metadata, would be useful. (I'm happy to help straighten out the metadata for any extension where the licensing is unclear or messy.)

* Improve LibreJS so that it uses less obtrusive metadata, and then work on Mediawiki to publish that metadata.

If someone on the list has interest *and time* to write code for either/both of the above projects I'd be happy to talk to you about the details, including introducing you to relevant other people outside of Mediawiki where that makes sense.

Thanks- Luis

[1] Relatedly: even if you disagree, and see a benefit in having a discussion, I'm not going to engage in it. It isn't just a waste of time unless it is paired with code; there are also people who'd love to have a public statement so they can say "see, WMF agrees with me", and I'm not going to place myself (or WMF) in any such camp.

[2] The utter annoying-ness of having this discussion at all is basically why jquery is now solely MIT-licensed, which is a loss for the GPL community.

-- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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