Re: The role of LibreJS and whether to draft a standard

[bill-auger]

i suppose what this is really suggesting, is that web browsers
should indicate the script licenses as a standard feature,
without the need for an add-on - the problem to solve is much
less technical than it is cultural - technically, librejs is
sufficient for its purpose - its simply that more people need
to become interested in the general idea - then the technology
could just as well develop organically, like most web standards
have - if enough web developers want some similar feature, or if
enough of their users request it, then the technical aspects of
this are relatively trivial

when RMS speaks publicly about librejs, he makes a point that it
is not trying to be a standard; but merely trying to raise
awareness of the general idea, that javascript should be
licensed, and that users should care about the licenses of the
code they are running - ideally, the web browsers would have
that feature; and there would be no librejs; but it is not very
important precisely how it is implemented

even if there were a standardized format for license
declaration, that would not imply that any web browser would
adopt it, or implement any similar feature in another way, nor
that users would appreciate the value of the feature - the
history of web browsers is such that web browser developers
implement features which they believe are valuable to their
users; and standards are usually ignored in the process - the
standards of the web have accumulated mostly by convention,
often despite the recommendations of the standards body; and
librejs is currently the only convention for javascript license
declarations

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:28:28 -0400 John wrote:
> Even if LibreJS came first,
> I wonder if it would help adoption to not reinvent the wheel.

that is exactly my point - librejs is the only such "wheel" -
there was nothing pre-existing to "re-invent", and there still is
nothing else similar to it - AFAIK, SPDX is only a set of
identifiers, eg: BSD, MIT, GPL3 - i dont believe that SPDX makes
any prescriptions for how any software should convey that
information; which is the essential requirement, in order for
anything like librejs to function

the main obstacle impeding adoption of anything like librejs, is
that most javascript does not convey licensing information in any
form - that is most often because it has no license, and/or the
developer does not know what are the licenses of the third-party
code-bases (possibly hundreds of them) which are distributed
along with that developer's code

if javascript developers generally do not license their scripts,
then there is nothing that librejs or any similar tool could do,
other than refuse to run those scripts, which would break many
websites, or to run the scripts anyways as they do now, which
would render the tool useless - so, it should not be surprising,
that web browsers do not have such a feature now, even if the
web browser developers or standards bodies were convinced that it
is a good idea

so the missing ingredient is any interest, in the general
concept of javascript licensing, in any form - standards are
useful only when there are competing conventions for performing
some task, in order to make them compatible - the actual format
is arbitrary at this point, so there is no friction to ease -
because there is currently no other example of a tool which
performs the same task as librejs in any way, a formal standard
would be equivalent to an informal convention, at least until
some other software has an incentive to adopt it - even then,
until a significant proportion of javascript actually has a
license, the utility of any such tool is mainly to prevent a
significant proportion of websites from operating as intended;
so there is little incentive for browser developers to implement
such a feature

so it is not the web browser developers who need to be convinced
first, nor any standards body - it is javascript developers who
need to take the initiative first - librejs is merely the first
stepping-stone to allow people some conventional way to convey
the license of their javascripts, and to allow web browser users
to express their dissatisfaction to the javascript developers,
when there is no clear licensing