Add licensing details to JavaScripts according to GNU LibreJS

[bhavin192]

Thank you for an awesome tool for website analytics!
About GNU LibreJS

LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial.

This basically requires the JS files to have a type of comments which specify the license, original source (if the file is minified), link etc. As far as I understood all the JS files we have are under AGPL license (and tracking one is in MIT), so it will be great to mark those files with the metadata.

Setting Your JavaScript Free

Especially the tracking script can be easy one to start with. I'm don't know JavaScript much, but if required I can spend time and see what can be done to get this done (at least for the tracking script).

For the /settings page

For the tracking script

[ukutaht]

You're correct in that the tracker is MIT licensed to avoid any virality issues on external pages.The rest of the product is licensed under AGPL.

Adding a comment will increase the size of the script (we are counting every single byte). Is there any other way to provide a license hint to LibreJS?

[bhavin192]

Adding a comment will increase the size of the script (we are counting every single byte). Is there any other way to provide a license hint to LibreJS?

I agree. I was looking at the LibreJS documentation again, here is what I found.

There is a way to have a HTML page with table of JS files being used by a site / tool (let's call it weblabels page). Every page which loads the scripts should add a reference to the weblabels page. Example: https://weblabels.fsf.org/jitsi.member.fsf.org/CURRENT/ is being referenced by each page on https://jitsi.member.fsf.org/ using this:

<a href="https://weblabels.fsf.org/jitsi.member.fsf.org/CURRENT/" rel="jslicense">JavaScript license information</a>

If my website is loading plausible.js, then my site should have the weblabels page, or the JS should have comments; which we are not considering. The only option for pages having tracking code is to have a weblabels page, with license name, original source etc. (Edit: I will confirm if this works by either trying myself or asking someone it works that way).

Does this warrant a documentation page? Or should I just add some more details on what needs to be done to get the LibreJS allow plausible.js? That way people can implement it on their site.

OTOH, for other scripts used by Plausible admin interface either weblabels or comment method might be useful I think.

[ukutaht]

Thanks @bhavin192.

It's a bit unfortunate that these are the only options. I wish there was a way to add license hints as HTTP headers. That would probably be the most convenient for all.

Does this warrant a documentation page? Or should I just add some more details on what needs to be done to get the LibreJS allow plausible.js? That way people can implement it on their site.

I have no idea how much interest there is for this. First time I've heard of LibreJS to be honest. I appreciate you putting the time in this but I'd need to see more people asking about LibreJS before taking the responsibility of maintaining official documentation on this. Until then, I would encourage writing a blog post or even just dropping the solution in this discussion so it's discoverable through search engines etc.

[bhavin192]

It's a bit unfortunate that these are the only options. I wish there was a way to add license hints as HTTP headers. That would probably be the most convenient for all.

I agree.

What you said about a documentation page for this, is totally valid. Once I'm done with my trials, I will post the solution for tracking script here.

[bhavin192]

@ukutaht what do you think about something like this for the admin interface of Plausible? https://invidious.snopyta.org/licenses
I don't know Elixir, but I can definitely try to implement a page like Invidious for Plausible. I can even take responsibility of maintaining that code 😄 This will involve creating a new page and making sure all the other pages have a reference to this page.

[ukutaht]

I think that would be great!