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Comment by mattigames | Hacker News Reader

It's always been weird to me how Microsoft invests so much in making JavaScript easy to develop and maintain with TypeScript but does so little to make it safe, the one thing JS needs is a standard library by Microsoft (or similar, e.g, Google) that we can trust, aiming to significantly reduce the number of dubious-origin dependencies of every JS project (on node and the browser)

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Here's another opportunity to point out this unfortunate licensing bug in TypeScript's standard library:

https://github.com/microsoft/tslib/issues/47

(Disclaimer: I like TS, but I filed the above bug.)

Aside, can anyone explain this to me?

>Please do not use "public domain", it's not a license and it makes it impossible to use such code in corporate context. //

Seems pretty ridiculous, "can't use code unless it's encumbered by licensing restrictions"??

Check out the CC0 license and its justifications:

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc... https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

CC0 is a licence. "Public domain" is a state.

Some works have no copyright, typically because they're the product of a US Federal institution, or the copyright has expired. In American English this copyright-free state is also known as "public domain". (In British English it can mean something quite different.)

To put something in the "public domain", you need to make a statement of such. In other words, a licence. You could just say "I put this in the public domain" but it may not provide the certainty that bigcorps like. CC0 is a way of saying this in bigcorp-friendly language. (The CC0 page at https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc... explains this well.)

Alternatively, you can use WTFPL, which is a really great way of putting your works in the public domain while guaranteeing that bigcorps won't use them (see: statements on HN by Google people, passim).

>Alternatively, you can use WTFPL, which is a really great way of putting your works in the public domain while guaranteeing that bigcorps won't use them

I thought the point of WTFPL was that you didn't care who used your code for what.

Google will not use anything licensed under WTFPL. Other companies might be the same.

https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...

>To put something in the "public domain", you need to make a statement of such. In other words, a licence. You could just say "I put this in the public domain" but it may not provide the certainty that bigcorps like. CC0 is a way of saying this in bigcorp-friendly language.

It's more than that - it's impossible to place things in to the public domain in many juristictions - like the UK.

(This is because copyright is property, and property must have an owner under the law of England and Wales [also Scots law I think, but I don't know]. Thus, a declaration that something is in the PD is of no effect.)

You can abandon property to public ownership (land, cars, anything you leave in the street in England & Wales: it gets sold and proceeds go to the Exchequer or Police) so your justification at the end doesn't sway me.

Moreover, Google have been allowed to assume ownership of intellectual property (content of books). The moral rights on those properties have been effectively cancelled.

>You can abandon property to public ownership (land, cars, anything you leave in the street in England & Wales: it gets sold and proceeds go to the Exchequer or Police) so your justification at the end doesn't sway me.

Sure, bona vacantia is A Thing - but your comment spells it out. The copyright gets _sold_ by the state to whoever wants to buy it.

That is not the same thing as public domain - the new owner can enforce their monopoly rights over the works which can screw over anybody depending on the work being "in the public domain".

"Public Domain" is encumbered by Moral Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights . While they play a very minor role in the US, they exist in Canada and most of the EU. Something like the MIT-license neatly gets rid of them.

Cool, thanks.

I'd argue that when I release something to the public domain that means that I give an open license such that the work can be used as if in the public domain until such time as it actually enters the public domain.

But, yes, I can see how that's a risk companies might avoid until caselaw backs that up.

Google has already developed a good featureful JS library. It's called the Closure library. It can be used independently or together with the Closure compiler. It's also more than a decade old, ensuring widespread compatibility, though not necessarily using modern idioms.

Some communities like the ClojureScript uses it extensively and a front end project in ClojureScript require very few dependencies.

I have around a decade doing JavaScript and never heard of it before, any guesses why it might not be widely known/used?

Edit Answering to Jyaif: Anecdote is not data, here is it comparing the popularity of Closure library against Angular -another Google technology-: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

FWIW I never wrote JS and yet I've heard of it.

> the one thing JS needs is a standard library by Microsoft

You must be new to this whole Microsoft vs Netscape thing :-)

What Microsoft should do is get Google & co. onboard with creating a full-featured standard library. Microsoft going at it alone would create a huuuuuge backlash because of ye olden days.

Fair enough, yeah it might be better as a collaboration, and if they could include Mozilla and Twitter in the mix that would be even better.

Yeah, remember the left-pad incident? It took until ECMAScript 2017 to make such a simple function part of the standard library. Things are slowly getting better, but JS is still rather lacking compared to "batteries included" languages like PHP and Python.

This comes up pretty often, what would you like to see in such a standard library? I consider the libraries included in Node pretty extensive these days.

Node is a tiny part, the big fish is JavaScript in the browser

The person I replied to compared the stdlib to that of PHP and Python, both of which are backend components. Frontend land is getting frequent updates already, with a relatively good process, vendor backing and incubation in browsers, not sure what the complaint is supposed to be there? That it's too slow? Imho that's a good thing when it comes to most language changes.

Yeah is too slow, but is not only that, is that it makes senses for it to exist years on user-land as a library (or multiple ones) before being implemented on any standard.

For what it's worth, I don't think that's a bad thing. Assuming you're talking about jQuery and the like, what was adopted to the specifications is the consensus of many years and wouldn't have been predictable in the first few of that library's history. I mean, frontend land is incredibly fragmented and browsers are no operating systems. Clean APIs and stability, to me, are worth far more than being quick to adopt the latest trend. Otherwise we get competing pet standards again, "made for firefox / chrome" buttons, without significant developer adoption. Libraries and shimming aren't inherently bad, single line libraries on NPM are.

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