- From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:03:49 -0500
- To: public-script-coord@w3.org
It occurred ot me recently that there's no reliable way to determine
the license under which a piece of JavaScript is released. People can
put something in a comment, but this doesn't prevent intermixing of
potentially conflicting licenses, and it would be difficult to write,
say, a Web browser extension to report the status of all the scripts
that were loaded.
The Free Software Foundation has a suggestion [1], but it uses comments,
so that, for example, the link to the uncompressed JavaScript isn't
easily determinable after the script has loaded:
// @source: URI
Any machine-readable license information (at the very least,the name of
the license and a link to the full text) should be discoverable,
possibly
along with other metadata such as version, author, etc.
The FSF suggestion is also not necessarily representative of people
who want more restrictive, or different sorts of, licence than the GPL.
In an informal conversation, Doug Schepers suggested to me that I
contact this group (I am not on this list, please cc me in replies)
to see if anyone here has interest in taking it up, maybe with ECMA,
and maybe also the possibility of rel/rev values in HTML to indicate
expectations.
Thanks for your time!
Liam
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Received on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 14:03:51 UTC