Omniture & Fedora

[Jesse Eversole Jr]

Karsten,

This is new territory for me and reminds me of the days when I used to 
deal with "fair use" in the digital capture and copying of material 
submitted by faculty to the library reserve desk.  My approach on issues 
like this is to just put the question to Omniture and see what they 
say.  I do know that they have a rather large piece of javascript 
embedded in a function call that does all the heavy lifting of logic 
when it comes to marking up the image call to their backend servers.  I 
have no idea what it means to have a FLOSS license on a piece of 
javascript that sends marked up query strings to an opaque service 
handler.  Even if the javascript were released under a FLOSS license it 
would not be usable without a contract with Omniture to enable a network 
service to talk with it.  Right now I don't see compatibility.  You 
might want to mention something to the awstats community about adding 
client side tracking to the software might be something of interest to 
the community. 


Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 15:55 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>
>   
>> Do the pieces of software (the javascript on the 
>> client in this case) have an open source license?
>>     
>
> Sorry to arrive late to this discussion.
>
> The Omniture JS code used to be on fedora.redhat.com, and it was
> docs.fedoraproject.org for a while.  Mike McGrath (iirc) and I were
> discussing its existence one day when we noticed docs.fp.o was loading
> slowly due to the Omniture calls.  So, that was one mark against the
> service in general -- it presented another point of failure on release
> days, which are ironically the days we'd want the most traffic analysis
> for.
>
> The reason I decided to yank the code is clear -- it is not-FLOSS and we
> have no rights to use or distribute it as part of Fedora Project web
> properties.  
>
> Here is a sample of the Omniture JS from redhatmagazine.com:
>
>         <!-- SiteCatalyst code version: H.1.
>          Copyright 1997-2005 Omniture, Inc. More info available at
>          http://www.omniture.com sec -->
>         <div id="oTags">
>         <script type="text/javascript">
>         <!--
>         var s_account = "redhatcom";
>         -->
>         </script>
>         <script language="JavaScript" src="/js/s_code.js"></script>
>         <script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.redhat.com/j/rh_omni_footer.js"></script>
>         <script language="JavaScript"><!--
>         if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf('MSIE')>=0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-')
>         //--></script><noscript><img
>         src="https://smtrcs.redhat.com/b/ss/redhatcom/1/H.2--NS/0"
>         height="1" width="1" border="0" alt="" /></noscript><!--/DO NOT REMOVE/-->
>         </div><!-- oTags -->
>         <!-- End SiteCatalyst code version: H.1. -->
>
> The code only has a copyright notice and no FLOSS license.
>
> As Toshio states later in this email, that is the #1 blocker.  I
> consider the "added point of failure" #2, because of historical problems
> with Omniture that I'm not convinced are just history.
>
> So Jesse -- if you can find out if Omniture can or will license that
> code under an OSI approved license, then we'll actually have something
> to discuss.  Otherwise, it is a ForbiddenItem.
>
> - Karsten
>