Regarding the use of FLOSS compatible JavaScript and their sources, what are
your thoughts on the sourcemap technology? It is currently only supported in
Chrome/Chromium (soon in Firefox), but it allows you to have easier access to
the source code and debugging it in developer tools after the code has been
minified in popular tools like Closure Compiler.
For example with jQuery, the minified version at
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js has the //@
sourceMappingURL=jquery.min.map line of code linking to the
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.map file in JSON
format that the Chromium developer tools gain access to the jquery.js file
with full debugging support.
Since this technology is new and many sites that run non-free JavaScript will
probably not include sourcemaps, are you somewhat interested in its
potential? Of course if the developer goes out of his or her way to offer
source code in this method, it should be under a FLOSS license. More info at
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/
One more thing... when picking a FLOSS license for JavaScript, what do you
think is the safest one to use? The BSD and MIT licenses are not copyleft,
but then they don't force other code to be GPL if mixed with GPL code. How
about MPL 2.0 which is a FSF approved file level copyleft license that is
compatible with GPL 2, LGPL 2.1, and AGPL 3 and above?
