DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform • Hacker News Board

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#31

Post by Hoff » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 1:34 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #4

Hoff wrote: post #2

The first part of the software license looks to be BSD/MIT-like with the to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,... sentence, but then there's this paragraph: This permission does not include: (a) any use of the Software other than for its intended purpose; or (b) any use of t…

I imagine that that's CYA; one thing both party organizations have in common: they are saturated with lawyers.

There's asset covering, and there's a license where you're assumed guilty until litigated.

And going against an organization that's "saturated with lawyers"?

Even if I were creating a voter registration web site, I'd likely not use this package, as reusing this PDF fulfillment package for any other use within that web site would potentially put the organization in licensing jeopardy. With this license, it'd be safer to re-implement rather than to re-use.

I'm not touching this license with a barge pole.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#32

Post by nakkiel » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

Read your comment (and other's) about the PDF filling and got interested into looking at the source.

I think doing it this way is wrong. It's essentially the same thing as putting your code and HTML together in a PHP file for example.

When the format of a PDF file is fixed and must be filled computationally, I'd advise to add PDF fields to the original and fill those by name through API calls instead of using coordinates.

That way, you can hope to write your code once and update the PDF when necessary.

But OK, it's all pretty dumb and maybe not worth a mention at all.

Re: DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform

#33

Post by tptacek » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 3:48 PM UTC

nakkiel wrote: post #32

tptacek wrote: post #5

This application is very, very simple; it's a practically the starting skeleton of a modern Rails/Devise application. One useful reason to bookmark it: it's a pretty good how-to for "any web application whose purpose is to spit out PDF files that need to follow a specific format". There are a LOT of business processes that work like that.

Read your comment (and other's) about the PDF filling and got interested into looking at the source. I think doing it this way is wrong. It's essentially the same thing as putting your code and HTML together in a PHP file for example. When the format of a PDF file is fixed and must be filled computationally, I'd advise to add PDF fields to the original and fill those by name through API calls instead of using coordin…

I think there's two things going into that: first, that Prawn's support for PDF forms is janky, and second, that the way they implemented the precise look/feel of the original PDF form was to use a cut-down version of the original as a template.

Which is a good thing to know how to do; I've had to deal with forms that were very annoying to reproduce with the tools available to Ruby programs.