Table of Contents
librejserver: a server program serving librejs compliance info
WIP - it does not work yet.
The program should return librejs report for free javascript on a given webpage. It should return a JSON for a given url:
http://localhost:5678/https://fsf.org
This should return a JSON report of the compliance of https://fsf.org.
A proper version of this program should take user input of a url with all free javascript (url to a webpage, not a javascript file), run librejs compliance script on the url, and return the report to user. If the user is ok for the report to be shared, it will also be added to a database. The server can then serve a filtered / sorted list of urls by compliance, popularity etc. This can help users discover sites that are librejs-compliant.
Purpose of the program
LibreJS does not recognise all free javascript. That is, every javascript code or file falls under one of the three catogories:
- Free and librejs-compliant - these scripts will be accepted by librejs and excuted. Example: JS on most FSF/GNU pages.
- Free and librejs-noncompliant - these scripts will be blocked by librejs. Example: peertube instances
- Nonfree javascript. Example: YouTube web client.
To improve LibreJS coverage means to make it recognise more free javascript so that the number of scripts in the first category increase and that of the second category decreases.
To that end, we design a server program that maintain a database of free scripts, that come from webpages whose urls are submitted by users of this server.
Initially users should only submit webpages they believe contains only free javascript, LibreJS-compliant or not. Ideally the user should be able to explain why they think all the js on the page is free, e.g. it is an instance of a free software web application.
With this, librejs devs can use this data and statistics to determine how to update the compliance check to cover more free javascript. On the other hand, LibreJS can include a functionality to download the database from the librejserver, and add javascript to whitelist depending on some threshold from the data (e.g. popularity of the script based on user submission counts or upvotes).
Possible problems
This sounds like an SaaSS. Users will let the server run the librejs compliance script, which they can do on their own computer. However, the main functionality of this server program is crowd-sourcing LibreJS compliance info, similar to a wiki. Therefore, the compliance script run on the server can be considered as a computation done by the project which the user is part of.
Another possible problem is that without moderation or approval, user may submit pages with nonfree javascript, intentionally or unintentionally. This requires moderation or approval. Something similar would be the FSD review process, but that would be too slow or heavy. Perhaps the moderation can be done automatically using an upvote / downvote functionality.
see also https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-librejs/2022-11/msg00003.html
Acknowledgement
This document is improved thanks to conversations with iank.