Re: [xml-dev] [ANN] Saxon-CE 1.0 (XSLT 2.0 on the browser)

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 14/06/2012 19:59, John Cowan wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Michael Kay<mike@saxonica.com>  wrote:
>
>> This means that finally, XSLT 2.0 is available on the browser. For practical
>> purposes, that means every browser.
> Very cool stuff.
>
>> It's not open source, but there's a free license for small organizations,
>> and it's our hope that the pricing is sufficiently attractive to give good
>> value to everyone. Licensing is on a per-web-domain basis.
> It's not very clear whether the terms and conditions actually require
> execution in the browser.  Do you take it to be legitimate to do the
> transformations server-side, say in node.js, provided the appropriate
> license is obtained for the domains to which the transformed data is
> served?
I think the code will only run in a browser or in an environment that 
does a very good job of pretending to be a browser. I don't know much 
about node.js, but I suspect it doesn't satisfy that condition, although 
it might well be that someone with the right skills could configure it 
to look sufficiently like a browser for Saxon-CE to run, in which case I 
think we would probably be quite content; if it looked like a serious 
disruption to our business model then we would have to think about 
revising the T+Cs. (But we've yet to work out how to handle cloud 
computing in our T+Cs, so it probably wouldn't be a priority...)

>   (U.S. law at least allows reverse engineering, despite the T
> &  C, for the sake of interoperability as a matter of fair use.)
It will be interesting to see how case law develops on this (does it 
allow hacking my DVD player to play US recordings?). But I don't think 
you'll see Saxonica trying to test the law on this. It's certainly not 
our intent to use licensing to prevent people getting value from the 
software in imaginative ways, especially if they have paid for it...

I suspect however that if you really want a version of Saxon to run 
under node.js, a better approach would be to start with Saxon-HE and do 
the minimum hacks to make it compile under GWT. That would involve 
redoing some of the work we did in Saxon-CE to replace calls on JDK 
classes that aren't supported in GWT, but that isn't a vast amount of 
effort.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

>