Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinlardinois | Hacker News Reader

And it looks like to get your Javascript to be considered free, even if it already is free, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get this to pick it up:

http://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.htm...

This is a joke.

View on HN

I don't see the problem with putting a small license comment in my JS includes. A lot of people only want to run Free Software to the extent possible. Just as it's not unreasonable for restaurants to have offerings for people who are vegans, it's not unreasonable for software developers to offer software for hardcore FOSS types.

If you don't understand or dislike it, you don't have to include license info in your JavaScript, but why disrespect people who care?

Vegans are probably much more likely to give you money in exchange for something.

>why disrespect people who care?

It's called FUD.

All cultures are welcome except free-software culture. Have you ever noticed that?

Apparently having certain software standards puts us on the same level as religious fanatics. I don't worship GNU, I don't threaten to chop heads off if people don't use free software.

The reality is that free software culture poses a threat to proprietary business practices and so many companies have incentive to create a narrative where those of us who prefer free software and certain philosophical ideals are seen as crazy fanatics.

Meditate for a few hours a day? no problem.

Pray toward mecca seven times a day? fine.

Prefer free software on your computer? GOD I HATE FREE SOFTWARE FANATICS AND THEIR INSANE PHILOSOPHY!

Sure, but how else can it tell? It isn't like code inherently has some kind of magical tag that tells you the license. So they created a format to tell the license.

My point is that you're likely to get a lot of false negatives. For your browser to remain usable after installing this, you'll pretty much have to add every new site you visit to your whitelist.

This convention will only work if everyone follows it. And very few will because it's aiming to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

>This convention will only work if everyone follows it.

Just like original FOSS licenses started out then? What's the problem? People who care will start to follow it and if it turns out to be a good idea (like how the original GPL & similar licenses came to being into a mostly proprietary licensed world) people will follow.

Except with most FOSS licenses, the application of the license has a direct and practical impact: You can hack on it yourself.

The problem is that Javascript is already like that (obfuscated or otherwise). I can step through even the crappiest JS obfuscation with a debugger and, say, find out if it's working against me. Or tracking me. Or whatever.

The license header stuff serves no purpose but to appease the paranoia of a subset of a microscopic subset of users who would not visit a website, on principle alone, because of the "freeness" of its javascript.

And this is not a slam against those users, it's a simple fact of numbers. Even with the most liberal possible estimates of how many of those users exist, and the most conservative estimate of what my theoretical engineers are getting paid, it doesn't make sense to bother with this.

You can also reverse engineer code, sniff your network traffic, and lots of other things with proprietary software, but that doesn't make it free.

Also, there _is_ a practical impact on the JS you see on a particular site: the fact that you can debug it doesn't mean you can change and redistribute it.

There are very real implications of having a piece of code released under a particular license and it's hardly accurate to call these implications "paranoia".

No, not really. I was talking about network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), in that this tool for detecting free Javascript is only useful if all (or at least most) of the free Javascript on the web is marked as such.

When you apply a license to a piece of software, it's immediately useful for that particular piece of software. You don't need an entire ecosystem of free software for one free program to be useful.

I use Browserify and a lot of NPM modules (and therefore their dependencies too) on my own sites. Some of the sites are only built from free and open source code, but manually complying with LibreJS's standards for listing all of the licenses involved seems painful. It would be really handy if there were a Browserify plugin that recorded the licenses of the packages of the files that went into my Browserify bundle, and then output that licensing info into a LibreJS-compatible way that I could reference in my pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com