Omniture & Fedora

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 08:29 -0400, Jesse Eversole Jr wrote:
> 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.  

Exactly, that would clear things up.

> 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.  

I think it's analogous to the GPL'd kernel modules that talk with
not-in-the-kernel binary-only drivers.  There are other examples.  It's
not anyone's favorite way of doing things, but it is at least
technically legal, if not entirely ethical.

> 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, it would be a licensing to allow compatibility of use, not really
to create a community around it.  They can dual-license it, btw, being
the sole owner of the copyright, and have a wide range of licenses to
choose from.

One catch may be where the JS is actually subtly different for each
client of Omniture.

Bottom line -- I seriously doubt Omniture will consider this idea just
for Red Hat, unless they have other clients who are asking for it.  But
if you do ask and they say yes, we'll be glad to seriously consider the
idea.

>   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. 

Any chance that Red Hat is interested in furthering the quality of free
and open stats tracking?  Maybe help grow a solution that is better than
the for-pay, non-free options?

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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