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Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the 'Javascript trap' posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. 'It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software,' Stallman writes. 'But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome.'"
I think it's pretty clear, if you just keep the fundamental principles of free software in mind. If you use software, you should have the freedom to modify it and run a modified version. Just remember that, and this article will make a lot more sense to you.
I think he enunciates quite clearly the "danger": that we are becoming more and more dependent on software that is temporarily downloaded to our computers in a semi-obfuscated manner and executed to perform non-trivial tasks. This is not quite breaking the "freedom to modify" principle, since technically the source code is available, but he's calling it a trap because in practice it's extremely difficult to get in there and modify a web application since current browsers don't provide an easy way to do it, and the "source code" is almost impossible to read.
Look -- people are calling him crazy for this but I don't know why. (Possibly because they'll jump on any opportunity to call him crazy.) But frankly he's right. If you value the ability to modify software that you use, web applications don't make it easy to do. Not only that, but they can change on you while you're in the middle of using them, making it difficult for any local modifications (based on GreaseMonkey e.g), to "stick".
I don't think he comes off as crazy at all in this article, nor is he even suggesting we don't use JavaScript or anything silly like that. He's merely pointing out some potential problems with web applications vis-a-vis the freedom to modify, and providing a possible solution in the form of metadata.
In fact I'd say this is one of the more practical and shorter things I've seen him write, so I can't understand why people are jumping all over this.
Free-libre software is about more than just looking through source code. The availability of source code is a means to an end; there are non-free licenses that provide access to source code, and even the right to modify that source code. Free-libre licensing grants you freedoms that you really do not have with proprietary systems, including those that make code available to you:
Maybe these are not things that really matter to you. I have encountered restrictions on every one of the above items from different software packages, and it has caused me and the other users/administrators of the software serious headaches. In cases where free-libre software was introduced, people just got their work done -- no worries about breaking the law, no worries about the software suddenly becoming inoperable, no restrictions on who we may discuss the software with.
Palm trees and 8
I share the same philosophy about computers. I don't want to waste hours of my life on coding software. I'd rather just work 1 hour of overtime, and then go out and buy the program I need.
You don't get the whole point of Free Software in the first place.
But the beauty of it is that even you can profit from its fruits. Every time you surf on the internet, or listen to music or watch a movie. Most of those are running on or were created with Free Software.
You are using software which uses Berkeley sockets, from the BSD project, to communicate with others over the Internet. Either the code is from BSD or it has been written to be compatible with BSD sockets. Very little software in the world speaks TCP/IP that doesn't use Berkeley sockets to do so.
If you are using a closed-source browser other than Opera, you're using one based on the open-source Mosaic or Mozilla browsers, or on the open-source KHTML or WebKit (which itself is based on KHTML). The very first web browser and the very first graphical web browser were both open source. The very first browser was called WorldWideWeb (and later Nexus to avoid confusion with "The Web" as a whole), and Tim Berners-Lee released it into the public domain in 1993. All web browsers are knockoffs of an open source project, some more directly than others.
You are using a site which is written in a language which has always been open with language tools that have always been open (that language is Perl, by the way, and any commercial Perl distribution you've seen is a copy of the open one).
The code for the Slashdot site itself is open. Although some changes may be different between the version control system and the exact code this site runs at any given moment, an open-source version of the codebase exists over at Slashcode.com for your enjoyment or use.
The site is served by use of an open-source web server called Apache. Perhaps you've heard of it. The original web server was also open-source software, and was called CERN HTTPd. CERN HTTPd was adopted by the W3C as W3C HTTPd and has sicne been supplanted by the open-source web server Jigsaw. All web servers are clones of an open-source project.
Any version of Emacs you might use, including any of the commercial Emacs clones that are proprietary and closed-source, are based on the open-source Emacs written by none other than RMS.
Most of the first games for computers had freely available source, and some of them are still available. That's a whole market in which the closed-source people were not the first movers.
I wonder if RMS visits any websites at all besides fsf.org
I'm glad you asked. Let's get a direct quote from the man himself:
"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer."
At the risk of obvious ridicule he doesn't give the reasons behind this choice, but that's not really important here. Stallman is truly out of touch with the real needs of people who actually use computers on a daily basis. He is out of touch by his own choice. What really burns my taters is that so few properly chastise Stallman for this foolishness. Even worse, some actually defend it.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
How does Stallman use the web?
Here's how.