Hi,
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 21:00, Mathieu Bridon
(bochecha)<bochecha(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Hi,
The OpenLayers package (already in Fedora, owned by Cristian in CC and
of which I'm a co-maintainer) bundles a JavaScript minimizer called
jsmin [1]. I know this is bad practice to have a tool bundled like
this, and I wanted to remove it from the source RPM and make it use a
system version of jsmin that would be installed in its own package.
However, I saw that jsmin had already been submitted to Fedora and was
refused because the license specifies that « The Software shall be
used for Good, not Evil. » [2]
I discussed it with the OpenLayers devs (see attached IRC log) and it
seems we have 2 possibilities.
1. The jsmin.py script was rewritten from scratch to mimic the
behavior of the C original version. It currently contains the
following license header:
[snip]
My question is, as this seems to be a « clean room implementation »,
could it have a different license than the original jsmin ? This would
make the python version suitable for Fedora (correct me if I'm wrong)
and that would allow me to build OpenLayers using it.
Any thoughts on this solution? Is that legally possible?
If so, I'll try to contact the writer of the Python implementation to
see if he is willing to relicense his script.
2. The second possibility is to simply build OpenLayers without
jsmin.
This would however result in a much bigger JavaScript file, leading to
worse performances.
That's a solution I'd rather avoid, but if this is the only
possibility, I'll do it.
Best regards,
[1]
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html
[2]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455507
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Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)