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Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

> this is a set of directives so wildly out of step with common engineering practice

how so? It's just a set of guidelines for how program such as LibreJS might interpret what trivial JavaScript code looks like. If you think it's wrong, write to RMS and tell him, or tell me and I'll pass it along.

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But something like:

it uses dynamic JavaScript constructs that are difficult to analyze without interpreting the program

calling methods with the square bracket notation

feels like a totally arbitrary restriction. That has nothing to do with free software and everything to do with the difficulty of analysis. Stupid.

They're reasonable signs that the JavaScript is non-trivial, not restrictions. You can write a program that uses them and release it under a free software license and LibreJS will run it.

Here's a good example of a trivial JavaScript program.

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:alert('hello world')">click me</a>

For any non-trivial JavaScript programs, a free software license is required if you want it to be run by LibreJS -- a program designed to block any nonfree software from running on your computer inside a web browser.

I don't understand this view point. If this is about Free Software, then triviality should be irrelevant, either the code is Free or it isn't. I can write an arbitrarily complicated program within their constraints, license it under a non-free license and this thing will run it.

Those forms are not (supposed to be) blocked if they are attached to a free license.

It might be useful to automatically cross reference to a source like GitHub or NPM. Code could very well have licensing information at the source, but not serve it to web clients. Just the name of the library would be enough to get a lot of these.

The name is not nearly enough. I could serve a jquery-1.11.1.js file that has my own proprietary modifications. A checksum could fix this. However, what about when minified JavaScript is served, as is often the case? What source code corresponds exactly to the "binary" (minified source)? People use different minifiers/uglifiers with different settings. And then there's the issue of minifying all of your source files and then concatenating them into a single file. It's a tough problem.

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