"A common one I see people bring up is jQuery. They say "Oh, it's jQuery,
which is free already", to which I disgaree. jQuery is under the MIT license.
It's not under a copyleft license like the GPL, so people aren't required to
pass on freedom to the people using it. If the website's only offering a
minifed version (essentially a compiled version) of jQuery, how is a computer
(or even a human) intended to know if the author is in fact passing on the
required four freedoms if there is no source code, etc.? (The preferred form
for modification, and a minified JavaScript thing is hardly that.)"
You couldn't be more wrong. The MIT is as free software as the GPL and
respects the four freedoms. You just want everything to be GPL, which is
becoming more and more niche as JavaScript libraries are going for permissive
licenses since permissive encources more community and corporate
contributions instead of the GPL which benefits the copyright holder only so
he can sell a commercial license.
Btw I think that more minified JavaScript libraries should use Source Maps to
show where the source code is. When you enable source maps in Chrome (and I
believe Firefox) adn go into the developer tools, it will already load up the
source file. From there I believe that JavaScript source files should have
their license included for which jQuery does.
Heck, the latest jQuery at
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js and
https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-2.0.3.min.js and of course
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js all have the "sourceMappingURL" to
link to a .map file that provides not only direct access to the source code,
but debugging tools.
If LibreJS wants to be more than antiquated software, it should start
checking for Source Maps too:
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/
