758185 - Replace HighCharts

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Input :: General, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

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

Comment 1

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

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.

Comment 2

[Luis Villa [Outside Counsel; for non-law use [e-mail]]]

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.

Comment 3

[Lonnen :lonnen]

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.

Comment 4

[Bogomil Shopov[:Bogomil]]

+1 for flotcharts. FHR uses it.

Comment 5

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

The new Input doesn't use highcharts. So marking this as FIXED.