On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 06:56:13PM +0200, Andrew Shadura wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've bumped into an interesting thing: python-jsmin claims to be a
> Python rewrite of jsmin, but it's not clear if it's infected by Douglas
> Crockford's "evilness" or not? It's in Debian currently, but look here:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1014607#c10

Hi,

I do not know whether Debian considers the Douglas Crockford license
(or, if you will, copyrightable material covered by the Douglas
Crockford license) to be nonfree. Fedora classifies this license as
nonfree.

The first comment on 
https://bitbucket.org/dcs/jsmin/raw/e0fa31661e18aaaa37285f22ae708dde3880a8d8/jsmin/__init__.py

says:

# This code is original from jsmin by Douglas Crockford, it was translated to
# Python by Baruch Even. It was rewritten by Dave St.Germain for speed.

I think "original from jsmin" should be understood as meaning
"originally from jsmin". It is reasonable to presume that the
referenced 'translation' by Baruch Even is a derivative work of the
original jsmin. There's no particular reason to assume that Dave
St. Germain's 'rewriting' eliminated any derivative work relationship.

Here
https://bitbucket.org/dcs/jsmin/issue/7/include-license-file
Dave says 

  I've never seen the original Crockford code, but the notice was on
  the jsmin.py that I modified. My version actually has no resemblance
  to the older jsmin, so one could consider it a "clean room
  implementation".

It's clear that Dave did see the Baruch Even code, since he modified it.

He also says "the credits in the source file are there to honor the
inspiration for the source, not the actual implementation."

None of this makes me inclined to see Dave's code as something other
than a derivative work of Crockford's jsmin.c. I have never really
attempted to compare the two though.

Richard


  


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