forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> Hi Adonay, thanks for taking this up!

You're welcome! ;)

> So what does it say? AFAIK it seems that LibreJS fails to recognize a
> number of Brotli-compressed assets. But I see no non-free code over
> there. What would help LibreJS to go green? I guess some licensing tag
> in the HTML would help it, but apart from that I see no reason to
> change the FSD approval: do you see any?

The compression/minification is not a problem per see. The issue is that
it doesn't have either one of the following (any of these if done will
probably be enough):

a) if the scripts are yours, then: an indication for license notice,
   that is: exact notice as recommended by the license, the reason for
   this is to make the notice not just readable, but understandable for
   the visitor/guest/reader.  If the goal was readability the notice
   would be: "Licensed under X" or even just "under X" or "X", but in
   understandability, it would be: "You are allowed to use, study, adapt
   share, sell, ... .... under the terms of license X".

   To understand this item (item (a)) better, think: How would someone
   completely new to web-based scripting learn about free/libre
   software? Certainly, simply inserting "Licensed under X" or "under X"
   or "X" doesn't help much the case for this new person.

   Unfortunatelly, for LibreJS to recognize both the copyright and
   license indicators, they must be between "@licstart The following
   is... " and "@licend The above is... " special comments ([1]).

b) if the scripts aren't yours (e.g.: they come from Discourse or from
   someone else) and together with that they also don't have what is in
   (a), then: what is missing is a weblabels page, [1] has more
   information on this.

The references in [2][3][4] also help further explain how to do (a) and
(b). The same references also explain alternative ways you can do (a),
but with some caveats.

Also I must note that software is a human creation, so it has
imperfections just like humans themselves, and I think I found one for
LibreJS ([5][6]), which affects the case pointed in (a). Although I
think I know why the bug referenced exists, it seems to be an incentive
for people to use "-or-later" options for GPL and its family of
licenses, and I personally agree with such incentive. ;) In any case,
even if LibreJS doesn't recognize a free/libre software license --- say
GPL-3.0-only ---, at least we should make the necessary markup
prentending it would.

Back to the lack of proper license notices. One must note that in case
of minified/compressed/obfuscated JavaScript, the license-related fields
aren't the only requirement, this is true for both (a) and (b), and the
references I made have more information on this.

Ideally, this should be pushed upstream, and should be the default, not
just staying in FSFE's instance, because the benefit and software
freedom would be greater if upstream receives this. However, upstream
must of course be welcoming to the patches related to this, otherwise we
might aswell know beforehand with which community we'd be trusting our
communication tool to --- and believe me when I tell you that I already
saw multiple hostile people (from either known projects or from
websites) either telling me that I should stop or simply refusing my
patches.

All in all, you might as well be able to see now that this is no longer
a matter of packaging said software into free/libre distros like
Trisquel, GuixSD, Parabola or whichever. The issue is really in
client-side scripting, and how clarified it is for the guest/visitor of
a website.

> The From: email address is configurable, so you can use a no-reply
> email. Actually I came to create a private category for Staff and
> assign it the 'no-reply' address, so that any reply comes to that as a
> new topic ; you may also assign the address to a group so it becomes
> like a support email.

Interesting! ;)


[1] <https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html>.

[2]
<https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/manual/html_node/JavaScript-Detection.html#JavaScript-Detection>.

[3]
<https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/manual/html_node/Free-Licenses-Detection.html#Free-Licenses-Detection>.

[4]
<https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/manual/html_node/Setting-Your-JavaScript-Free.html#Setting-Your-JavaScript-Free>.

[5] <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52636>.

[6] I plan to add an update to [5] so as to reflect the awesome decision
from SPDX project to redo the "-only" and "-or-later" pair of variants
for the GPL family of licenses instead of the easily missed no-"+" and
"+" pair.