For people who want to avoid running nonfree software, how can we tell if the software that a website gives us for accessing a forum powered by Discourse is free software? Without the JavaScript client software, the forum appears to be read-only, so I want to run the JavaScript on the website, but I see no indication here on Discourse Meta or on for example the Purism Forums (also powered by Discourse), that the client software is free software. Some of the script files have links to source maps, but the source maps I checked did not have any license information. I found an older topic that mentions “There is only one version of Discourse – the awesome open source version.”, but then I also found a topic that suggests that suggests that the CLA may allow for proprietary versions, but it has no examples of proprietary versions. One Discourse instance that does show licensing information is the FSF members forum (only accessible to members I think), which links to the GitHub Discourse repo, an FSF git repo, and the GitHub repo for an extension, but this information is only shown after the client software is already running, so it’s not very useful for deciding whether to run the program in the first place. Is there a way for me to figure out whether the client software served by a Discourse instance is free software without actually running that software? Or even if I do have to run the software, how would I get the full licensed source code of the client software for a Discourse instance? Surely the original discourse GitHub repo isn’t always sufficient, since people may have modified the software before redistributing it? Alternatively, is there a different Discourse app that doesn’t download software from the servers it connects to?

Maybe you are also interested in safe mode, which disables JavaScript customizations.

How can I tell if a particular distribution of the Discourse client is free software?

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