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Re: [LUG] JavaScript at 25 years old

 

Dear Ciarán,

> LibreJS is a good idea in theory, but it's an incredibly difficult thing to
> work with. For example, if you have a project using a build tool such as
> Webpack, the licence  files will be scattered or the licence declaration
> stripped at compile time and LibreJS will not recognise them. This means
> that even free software projects will be flagged as non-free by LibreJS.

> It would be nice if there were more development around it to create plugins
> for these build tools, but it looks like the appetite is not there as it's
> not a trivial thing to do. This means a lot of projects simply don't bother
> and rely on the central project licence. For example: go to Peertube with
> LibreJS turned on. Even though Peertube is FLOSS, LibreJS won't think so (at
> least not the last time I checked!).
>
> Ciarán

Sadly for LibreJS I have to agree with you on this. There are many sites
with free JS that don't get recognised as such. However, I would have
thought that the inconvenience of actually using it is a requisite for
improving the situation; when the base project is free software and has
its code hosted publicly there is an opportunity to patch it for LibreJS
that would probably go unnoticed if nobody used LibreJS.

Maybe the easiest option to get the ball rolling would be to have a
script that runs after Webpack/Browserify/BungleBundle (!) and adds the
necessary labels [1] at the developers' direction - so not an automatic
solution but rather a tool to help developers who have already ensured
that their projects contain only freely licensed modules.

Best wishes,

Sebastian

[1]: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/manual/html_node/Setting-Your-JavaScript-Free.html

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