Re: Fwd: [gNewSense-users] RFC Firefox Free Software

[Gervase Markham]

Dave Crossland wrote:
> Would asking Mozilla to provide a way of automatically querying their
> site to list the free ones be any good? (CC'ing to Gerv Markham -
> Gerv, I hope you can discuss this on list :-)

As far as I'm aware, there is (unfortunately) no way to determine 
programmatically the licensing terms of a particular extension. I think 
there should be.

Work is currently being done on a new version of the addons software, 
codenamed Remora.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora

You would probably be best served by contacting the Remora developers 
and asking that this feature be included.

This would require extension authors to specify the license. This is 
actually a good thing (you might mention) because some free software 
licenses require making source available, something the current addons 
site does not do. This may be legal in most cases, because none of the 
code is compiled and so it is its own source. But if there are binary 
XPCOM components included, it may not be.

Hope that helps.

Gerv