Re: LYNX-DEV Java/JavaScript

[Gregory S. Stark]

David Woolley <address@hidden> writes:
> > An option which would require less work than doing another implementation
> > of the language would be to rip out Netscape's JavaScript interpreter when 
> 
> This would probably breach the GPL, as I believe Netscape intend to use
> a licence which is similar to it, but more restrictive.

Actually the NPL is likely to be substantially less restrictive than the GPL.
It doesn't require any particular distribution terms on the binary, and it
allows you to combine it with other files under other distribution terms.

It would probably be legal if we kept all the GPL'd code out of the NPL'd
files, distributed the binary under the GPL, and fulfilled the NPL
requirements on any source changes to the NPL'd files. However, there may be
other issues I'm not thinking of. In any case NS has been tweaking the license
in response to feedback and RMS has recently spoken up asking for some
changes. Hopefully the final version will make it easy to include in GPL'd
browsers.

> In any case, you would have to modify Lynx greatly to meet the Netscape
> object model and you would have to strip out all the GUI references from
> the code.

Absolutely, there's no question implementing the object model will be the
hardest part. The good news is that it's something that can be done
incrementally. It's still a lot of work, and it'll never work 100% on a tty
browser.

greg