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
