Closed Bug 758185 Opened 12 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Replace HighCharts

Categories

(Input :: General, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: gerv, Unassigned)

Details

Input has a dependency on the not-open-source HighCharts library. The license is CC-BY-NC (non-commercial). http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html 

Bug 571967 was where we determined that the licence of HighCharts was not suitable.

In bug 615609, a change was made to pull HighCharts in dynamically. That means we are no longer hosting a copy, but our software still depends on it for proper function. Mozilla believes that "free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource", and we are committed to shipping free stuff for other people to reuse without restriction. So making it an external dependency is not really a solution. Input is a great piece of software; it should not be saddled with a no-commercial-use restriction.

We should replace HighCharts with something else. (We may find it easiest to reimplement their API on top of another JS charting library.)

I apologise for the delay in filing this bug; the relevant emails were at the bottom of my inbox.

Gerv
There is no open source charting library that uses web features (instead of Flash) and has the feature set we need (particularly the HighStock stock charting). The closest thing I could find was Dygraphs, which isn't quite there.

[1] https://github.com/danvk/dygraphs

So, we have choices.
- Build HighCharts from scratch under an open source license.
- Use something like Dygraphs which doesn't get us all the way there, and give up the features we're missing.
- Hope that we can contribute the features we're missing to something like Dygraphs.
- (Or, of course, we could try to buy and open source HighCharts, but people have rather ignored that suggestion in the past.)

We can do that, eventually. But it's going to take a lot of time away from critical path, K9o work, and there is basically no active development on Input right now.
Gerv's statement of Mozilla policy is correct. As far as I know, there is no legal question open here so removing myself from cc; please reinstate me if that changes.
On webtools we use flot (http://www.flotcharts.org/). It is a mature, canvas based graphing lib. I'm not sure that it has the entire feature set that you're after. Rickshaw also looks good, though last time I looked SVG was not performant on mobile.
+1 for flotcharts. FHR uses it.
The new Input doesn't use highcharts. So marking this as FIXED.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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