Re: Allow specifying the license with an HTTP header

[John Scott]

On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 4:14:51 PM EDT Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> What do you think of these ideas?

I think a more generalized method may be warranted. How does/should LibreJS 
handle WebAssembly, for example?

I'm glad to hear your idea, and it could be good for CMS systems that would 
otherwise be hard to tweak. A con of having that information in the transport 
instead of the file is copies and mirrors will lose that information.

LibreJS and friends need more than just license information though: they need 
to be told where the source can actually be found. If JavaScript is minimized, 
one may not be able to tell what version of the source actually corresponds.

Off-topic, but for projects conforming to the REUSE specification or already 
using some other scheme it'd be bad if they had to repeat themselves. SPDX has 
file tags like
SPDX-FileType: SOURCE
SPDX-FileType: BINARY

that almost get us there, but there doesn't seem to be one to specify source 
location in a binary file.

> How would standardization bodies respond?
I think it's good to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. A greater 
priority I'm adding to my own to-do list is to make programs and utilities, 
new and existing, aware and usable for checking and verifying.
In general, robust license checking schemes should support many methods.

> The license information could also be provided for downloads.
I don't know much about it, but Wget has this neat option:
--xattr turn on storage of metadata in extended file attributes

I don't know what dictionary is used for this type of metadata, but I know 
some browsers and programs across platforms use it.

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