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>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 fo

by Morgawr 10y ago

>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.

Karunamon 10y ago
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.
- andersonvom 10y ago
  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".
justinlardinois 10y ago
No, not really. I was talking about network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect 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.

by Morgawr 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago

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.

andersonvom 10y ago
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".

justinlardinois 10y ago

No, not really. I was talking about network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect 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.