[Bug-librejs] Suggestion for license tracking via a common database

[Matthew Carter]

Hi all,

Tonight I played with IceCat and LibreJS for the first time, and while I
love what LibreJS aims to do, I feel like only those who care about
Freedom will spend the time to maintain said Freedom.

It seems like there is a lot of free JS code out there, that is likely
not going to be updated with the LibreJS license tags (either due to
time/cost of adding the tags, or general apathy towards LibreJS).

I think a good solution would be to have a license database built into
LibreJS (or hosted online that LibreJS can query) to pull out license data for
known free JS code.

For instance, I have all of my site's code hosted under AGPLv3 on github,
but until now had not read up about LibreJS (and therefore completely lacked
the necessary parseable tags for license in the scripts).

It would be much more maintainable (and easy for other LibreJS users to find
working websites) if I, or another LibreJS user could have simply sent in my 
file's license, URL and md5 sum (or sha256) to a hosted database in some
type of delimited format similar to this (and maybe a link to where the
full codebase license can be found, to verify truth): 

        AGPLv3 | 0fa0c4e1464c8a95b33f59a3259d9b77 | 
http://ahungry.com/js/eqauctions.js

Then, when another LibreJS user encounters my site's javascript, even if I
had been unaware of the tag types LibreJS requires for parsing free JS (or
if I was aware but lacked the necessary time to update), they could have
updated the database and allowed others to run the code knowing it was
free (fixing the problem of 99% of the HTML5 web failing with
LibreJS).

The database would work for all the standard licenses and could even be
searchable on the web, as I hear one of the main reasons for pushing
inclusion of the
license data on the JS code files themselves are that the licenses are
not being properly distributed/communicated to end users with the JS
itself.

The LibreJS add on could even go as far as printing what license each
allowed JS fell under (maybe it already does this, but I haven't run
into any sites that actually passed the LibreJS tag check yet, even the FSF
directory fails as of this email).

Thoughts?

Thanks,
-Matt

-- 
Matthew Carter
address@hidden