Hello, I was watching a FOSDM talk about librejs and the general movement and thought it sounded like a really interesting initiative.
I was wondering if you guys have considered putting the license information in source map files. These are files that are designed to help debugging minified scripts by mapping the minified version back to the original source. These are linked by a comment in the minified file and contain a way to obtain the original source (either inline in the sourcemap or via a link) and are supported in many popular browsers (at least firefox and chromium). These maps are a simple json object and it would be easy to add information such as license and ideal links to the source (for example to a project page rather than just the raw file). For example a set of attributes could be: _FSFLicenseURL: ... _FSFLicenseCode: a short unique code to identify the license _FSFLicenseFree: A boolean for if the code is free. Obviously once accepted into the v4 spec the '_FSF' prefix can be dropped. I have but a code variable there but if you used a magnet link it would be unnecessary. I think that a huge advantage to this approach is that sitemaps are quickly becoming popular and above the site link comment (which many scripts already have) it doesn't require adding a single byte to a "typical" page download. This is a strong selling point for performance oriented sites and many sites already have sourcemaps integrated into their build system, so adding a couple of flags shouldn't be too hard. Furthermore it puts all of the metadata for a javascript file in one place. Another benefit is that the metadata is kept with the source, meaning that public CDN's[0][1] can manage this information once and all sites that use these files will have their javascript license information available. The major downside is that these maps are often larger than the minified file and would be needed to be downloaded to check the license. Just some food for thought. -- Cheers, Kevin
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