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maksverver / astral-codex-eleven

A Chrome browser extension to speed up loading of posts on https://www.astralcodexten.com/ by replacing the comments widget.
MIT License
3 stars 2 forks source link

Add option to use old blog styling #16

Open Pycea opened 1 month ago

Pycea commented 1 month ago

The diff will be a lot less horrendous once the refactor-comment-api branch merges. I wanted to get this out to discuss the license implications though.

The SSC blog styling is licensed under GPL3, which is incompatible with MIT. However, since this copies the look only, and not the code, I think the terms may not necessarily apply. It may still be good practice to add acknowledgements.

~The background image is loaded from where it's hosted on SSC, so it's not distributed as part of the extension, but I'm not sure if that's a valid workaround.~ The background is now an original creation to avoid the whole question.

maksverver commented 1 month ago

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I think there are several ways to handle the licensing issue.

First, I would much prefer to keep the styles that you copied from elsewhere in a separate file so that we can add a comment where we got it from. This makes it much easier to track code we don't “own” and to pull it out if someone complains (which I don't think is too likely). It should not be too hard to refactor styles.js to allow including styles from either a string literal or a file (I'd be fine with having every style in a separate file, too).

There are some independent advantages to putting styles into files: it's much easier to edit them in an IDE when they are in a separate CSS file, so the editor understands the file syntax. The main downside is that we create a lot of small files, but I'm not sure that's all that concerning since the total number of files is likely to be small (currently, there are 3 styles, I'm not sure that there will ever be more than 10).

Second, we could relicense the project as GPLv3 if that resolves the issue ­— I don't care that much about the license so long as it's somewhat permissive. And if you agree with this, we could easily do this, since you and I are the only two contributors so far. Otherwise, I would suggest committing the file and waiting until someone complains; I think the copyright status of CSS files is a little bit of a grey area, and I doubt anyone cares enough to make a big fuzz about this. I think so long as we have a way to remove the file if someone complains, we should be fine.

Pycea commented 1 month ago

I think you're right about separating out the option css into files. It may actually be a good time to organize the others too, instead of having everything in the main folder. I'll probably to that in a separate branch though.

For the old style css, I think separating out the file is sufficient for now. Fwiw, no one's complained about it in acx tweaks.

maksverver commented 1 month ago

Do you still want to work on this? If not, I think I could port the changes option to the current branch myself (but I'll probably just copy/paste a ton of stuff because the current commit history is a bit messy.)

Pycea commented 1 month ago

Sorry, been a bit busy lately, I'll finish this up soon. I think you can squash the commits into one if that's an issue.

maksverver commented 1 month ago

Take your time, I'll just keep this open for a while.

(At some point, I may want to create a release with some of the new features. Let me know if you have an opinion on which features should be included.)