Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Richard Stallman
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  > In practice, if sites that are 100% free software are not being 
  > recognized by LibreJS, and the way modern sites are put together makes 
  > doing this non-trivial,

What does that mean, concretely?  That argyment, as stated, is too vague to
prove anything.  That doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong, but I ask
you to state the argument clearly enough that we can judge it.

then the problem is LibreJS's approach, not the 
  > site.

That does not follow.  There might be something that can be improved
in LibreJS's approach, but "It's hard so give up" is not a good
reason.  In order to consider an improvement we need a specific idea
for what improvement.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)





Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Richard Stallman
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

To verify that a web site's JS code is free is difficult if it doesn't
indicate licenses and source code.  The lack of that also makes changing
the Javascript code difficult in practice.

Thus, passing LibreJS is important for users' freedom.  It is the
necessary follow-through for making the JS code free.

What is the difficulty in making Codeberg's JS code clearly licensed?
Could we halp do that?  It is much better to do work to make the code
clearly licensed than to do work to avoid saying whether it is clearly
licensed.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)





Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Aaron Wolf
Just my first impressions, I could imagine any FSF- or GNU-hosted spot 
for an authoritative list could work.

I can see how the Directory could tie in maybe.

It seems sensible enough that some process of recognition by GNU 
evaluators is acceptable, and combine that with a hash could possibly be 
enough such that *all* Forgejo (for example) instances (known in advance 
or not) would pass if they use the same js file with the same hash. And 
thus LibreJS would indicate that the hash has changed as soon as that is 
detected, and that would prompt a process of checking that the change 
doesn't change the licensing etc.


I can't speak to the technical issues, but the human work on maintaining 
the list would be feasible though not totally trivial. I could imagine a 
project like Forgejo having a script that automatically alerts FSF of 
changes to the JS, and I could imagine a Forgejo maintainer serving as 
the trusted adjudicator.


In practice, would allowing Forgejo to attest to its own freedom in such 
a list be any different than the status quo where the project attests to 
the freedom by marking licensing?


On 2024-01-05 3:53, Yuchen Pei wrote:

On Fri 2024-01-05 08:24:53 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:


The one thought on LibreJS improvement I was imagining so far:
Some sort of crowdsourced list of recognized free JS, like the way
that adblocking lists are put together to block ads. I imagine a
whitelist that just knows that Codeberg's JS is free, so it is
whitelisted not by individual local users of LibreJS but by a
collected list everyone gets by default.

For such a list to be authoritative enough to be used for forge
evaluation, it needs to be maintained and vetted. What would be the best
way to do that? A natural idea would be to draw from the Free Software
Directory, which FSF staff maintains by evaluating and approving entries
on weekly meetings. Does this process already evaluate javascript
libraries and applications? Are there already js projects in the FSD? I
see a submission of forgejo[1], but that may not be sufficient because
presumably codeberg has its own url under its own domain for the js
files, so naively either there needs to be a correspondence between
forgejo (possibly minified) js files and codeberg js urls. Technically
there should be hashes to the files also in case they get updated.

[1]https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Forgejo


On 2024-01-05 4:08, Yuchen Pei wrote:

On Thu 2024-01-04 13:49:00 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:

Note that there's also this issue at Gitea:
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13393
Anyway, I think it is not okay to downgrade Codeberg for not
functioning with LibreJS when it is 100% free software anyway.
Insisting on this particular tooling needs to not be such a strong
requirement.
I think LibreJS needs some improved options for operating and should
not be a blocker to Codeberg getting a higher grade.
In practice, if sites that are 100% free software are not being
recognized by LibreJS, and the way modern sites are put together makes
doing this non-trivial, then the problem is LibreJS's approach, not
the site.

Suggestions on how to improve librejs to make site administrators life
easier to comply are welcome :)

[... 33 lines elided]

Best,
Yuchen
--
Dr Yuchen Pei |https://ypei.org   | Timezone: UTC+11
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt


Best,
Yuchen

--
Dr Yuchen Pei |https://ypei.org  | Timezone: UTC+11
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt

Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Yuchen Pei
On Fri 2024-01-05 08:24:53 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:

> The one thought on LibreJS improvement I was imagining so far:

> Some sort of crowdsourced list of recognized free JS, like the way
> that adblocking lists are put together to block ads. I imagine a
> whitelist that just knows that Codeberg's JS is free, so it is
> whitelisted not by individual local users of LibreJS but by a
> collected list everyone gets by default.

For such a list to be authoritative enough to be used for forge
evaluation, it needs to be maintained and vetted. What would be the best
way to do that? A natural idea would be to draw from the Free Software
Directory, which FSF staff maintains by evaluating and approving entries
on weekly meetings. Does this process already evaluate javascript
libraries and applications? Are there already js projects in the FSD? I
see a submission of forgejo[1], but that may not be sufficient because
presumably codeberg has its own url under its own domain for the js
files, so naively either there needs to be a correspondence between
forgejo (possibly minified) js files and codeberg js urls. Technically
there should be hashes to the files also in case they get updated.

[1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Forgejo

> On 2024-01-05 4:08, Yuchen Pei wrote:
>> On Thu 2024-01-04 13:49:00 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:

>>> Note that there's also this issue at Gitea:
>>> https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13393
>>> Anyway, I think it is not okay to downgrade Codeberg for not
>>> functioning with LibreJS when it is 100% free software anyway.
>>> Insisting on this particular tooling needs to not be such a strong
>>> requirement.
>>> I think LibreJS needs some improved options for operating and should
>>> not be a blocker to Codeberg getting a higher grade.
>>> In practice, if sites that are 100% free software are not being
>>> recognized by LibreJS, and the way modern sites are put together makes
>>> doing this non-trivial, then the problem is LibreJS's approach, not
>>> the site.
>> Suggestions on how to improve librejs to make site administrators life
>> easier to comply are welcome :)

>>> [... 33 lines elided]
>> Best,
>> Yuchen
>> --
>> Dr Yuchen Pei |https://ypei.org  | Timezone: UTC+11
>> PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
>> https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt


Best,
Yuchen

--
Dr Yuchen Pei | https://ypei.org | Timezone: UTC+11
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt



Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Aaron Wolf

The one thought on LibreJS improvement I was imagining so far:

Some sort of crowdsourced list of recognized free JS, like the way that 
adblocking lists are put together to block ads. I imagine a whitelist 
that just knows that Codeberg's JS is free, so it is whitelisted not by 
individual local users of LibreJS but by a collected list everyone gets 
by default.



On 2024-01-05 4:08, Yuchen Pei wrote:

On Thu 2024-01-04 13:49:00 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:


Note that there's also this issue at Gitea:
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13393
Anyway, I think it is not okay to downgrade Codeberg for not
functioning with LibreJS when it is 100% free software anyway.
Insisting on this particular tooling needs to not be such a strong
requirement.
I think LibreJS needs some improved options for operating and should
not be a blocker to Codeberg getting a higher grade.
In practice, if sites that are 100% free software are not being
recognized by LibreJS, and the way modern sites are put together makes
doing this non-trivial, then the problem is LibreJS's approach, not
the site.

Suggestions on how to improve librejs to make site administrators life
easier to comply are welcome :)


[... 33 lines elided]

Best,
Yuchen

--
Dr Yuchen Pei |https://ypei.org  | Timezone: UTC+11
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt

Re: LibreJS (was Re: CodeBerg addition)

2024-01-05 Thread Yuchen Pei
On Thu 2024-01-04 13:49:00 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote:

> Note that there's also this issue at Gitea:
> https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13393

> Anyway, I think it is not okay to downgrade Codeberg for not
> functioning with LibreJS when it is 100% free software anyway.
> Insisting on this particular tooling needs to not be such a strong
> requirement.

> I think LibreJS needs some improved options for operating and should
> not be a blocker to Codeberg getting a higher grade.

> In practice, if sites that are 100% free software are not being
> recognized by LibreJS, and the way modern sites are put together makes
> doing this non-trivial, then the problem is LibreJS's approach, not
> the site.

Suggestions on how to improve librejs to make site administrators life
easier to comply are welcome :)

> [... 33 lines elided]

Best,
Yuchen

--
Dr Yuchen Pei | https://ypei.org | Timezone: UTC+11
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt