904320 - JavaScript not labeled as free

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, defect)

Description

[Luke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1 (Beta/Release)

Steps to reproduce:

Navigate to AMO with LibreJS. A warning appears informing the user of non-free code running on the page.


Actual results:

List of blocked JavaScript in https://addons.mozilla.org/ -
    https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/media/js/preload-min.js?build=ab94f7f-5201460e

    https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net//en-US/firefox/jsi18n.js?b=ab94f7f-5201460e

    https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/media/js/impala-min.js?build=ab94f7f-5201460e

    https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net//en-US/firefox/addons/buttons.js?b=ab94f7f-5201460e

    https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/media/js/zamboni/stats-min.js?build=ab94f7f-5201460e


Expected results:

A simple license should be appended to these javascripts so the users will avoid non-free code, see here for details:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html#AppendixA

This will help ensure the users are running fully free code and provide a much better web browsing experience.

Comment 1

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

Currently, we only serve minified bundles of JS. To iterate the list you've provided:

- preload-min is generated from jQuery (MIT licensed), in-house code (BSD licensed), and GA scripts (proprietary)
- jsi18n.js is composed of generated code by the gettext library and is conceivably licensed under BSD
- impala-min.js is composed of in-house JS (BSD) and various libraries (MIT, GPL, GPL2)
- buttons.js is composed of in-house code only (BSD)
- stats-min.js contains BSD, MIT, and Highcharts, which is under a proprietary license.

Including the license for each of these is impractical for a number of reasons:
- We have many libraries, and each has its own way of listing the license. It would take a substantial amount of effort to homogenize the way these licenses are included in the source files.
- Highcharts is not free software and would cause the site to break, anyway.
- Our minifier does various forms of mangling, which arguably makes it impossible to separate free for un-free code.
- The overhead of including all of the licenses in a format that's compatible with LibreJS is impractical and would add multiple large blocks of comments to the top of each of our minified scripts, substantially increasing the size of our code.
- Our current toolchain (jingo-minify) does not support uplifting license information from compiled scripts.

You can track the deprecation and removal of highcharts in bug 841397.

If you're interested in the licensing of individual scripts, you're welcome to visit our repo, where all applicable licenses are kept intact in the source:

https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/tree/master/media/js