More explicit terms of use are needed

[loveTensor]

Hi everyone, I think jsdelivr is a great free CDN. However, I have not found any explicit terms of use that describe what can be done and what is prohibited. This will make people unclear about the use limitation of the service provided by jsdelivr.

For example, is it considered kind of abuse if a person uses jsdelivr and Github together to work as a CDN for static assets? Is there a difference between personal use and commercial use of jsdelivr?

[jimaek]

I agree, we need to make this clearer. I think we already have a task for this.
To answer your question it depends. In most cases if its allowed by Github then it is by jsDelivr as well.
If you host thousands of images of your dog and use Github+jsDelivr as an alternative to Dropbox then that is against the rules.
But if its javascript, css and images requires for the site to operate then its fine.

We will try to make this clearer

[loveTensor]

I agree, we need to make this clearer. I think we already have a task for this.
To answer your question it depends. In most cases if its allowed by Github then it is by jsDelivr as well.
If you host thousands of images of your dog and use Github+jsDelivr as an alternative to Dropbox then that is against the rules.
But if its javascript, css and images requires for the site to operate then its fine.

We will try to make this clearer

Thanks for your reply. I'm happy to know that you have already realized this problem.
It depends, and what rule it depends should be clear.

[SukkaW]

@jimaek @MartinKolarik

Since more and more people are using GitHub + jsDelivr as free CDN by utilizing @gh-pages, @master, @latest, and it won't be able to cache at CDN Edge for a long time (7 days for now). I am worrying about it will cause significant load increasing on jsDelivr backend server.

For me, Sometime I do use jsDelivr as a free CDN, but I will publish a NPM package (which will be able to store in jsDelivr's S3), and only use very specific version number to make jsDelivr sending immutable cache-control header.

If the terms is about to change, the default cache-control for @latest, @master, @gh-pages should be reconsidered. 14 days will be my suggestions.

[MartinKolarik]

@SukkaW right now I think we'll do fine with the current cache times but we might reevaluate them later.

[MartinKolarik]

Please check #18247.

[loveTensor]

@MartinKolarik @jimaek So according to #18247, personal or commercial websites whose main purpose is not to display images or videos, if following the terms of use of jsdelivr and Github, are legal to use jsdelivr and Github to cache static assets, right?

[MartinKolarik]

If I had to really simplify it:

1. If the assets are mostly css, js, images, etc., that are part of the design, it's likely ok.
2. If the files are part of the main content, it may be a problem. E.g., a news website that used jsDelivr for all images included in the articles would probably still qualify as media hosting, even though the images are not the "main purpose" of it.

Keep in mind that this is a very simplified interpretation and in the second point, we may decide to make exceptions for projects that we consider valuable to the community.

[loveTensor]

If I had to really simplify it:

1. If the assets are mostly css, js, images, etc., that are part of the design, it's likely ok.
2. If the files are part of the main content, it may be a problem. E.g., a news website that used jsDelivr for all images included in the articles would probably still qualify as media hosting, even though the images are not the "main purpose" of it.

Keep in mind that this is a very simplified interpretation and in the second point, we may decide to make exceptions for projects that we consider valuable to the community.

@MartinKolarik
May you please talk more about the differences between your first example and the news website example? Is the news website likely considered as abusing because it uses excessive pictures or any other reason?
By the way, can you talk about using jsdelivr for image hosting of personal blogs?

[MartinKolarik]

If the intention of the news site was to simply offload their media hosting to jsDelivr, it would count as abuse. If their intention was to host some kind of open source based news website on GitHub and foster an open source community, it would be acceptable. If you just create a repo with a bunch of images for the only reason of proxying them through jsDelivr, it's probably against our terms.