Taking Action For Free JavaScript

Atticus Rex writes "Today the FSF kicked off a campaign to put pressure on webmasters to make their sites work without requiring nonfree JavaScript. The first target is Regulations.gov, a site the US government uses to take public comments on proposed regulations. Right now, the site requires nonfree JavaScript, requiring citizens to sacrifice their freedom as users to take part in their democracy."

Comments

Gosh!!!

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I never realized visiting a website required me to "sacrifice my freedom"!

Re:Gosh!!!

[grcumb]

I never realized visiting a website required me to "sacrifice my freedom"!

Look, I know it's a lot to ask that you actually pause to reflect before dashing off that Frist Psot and racking up all that precious karma. But why don't you wind down your supercilious, holier-than-thou tone and actually read what Stallmann says about the Javascript trap?

If you did, you'd see that he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code, especially that which uses dynamically constructed elements, is hard to read, hard to share and hard for the community to improve. The tone of the article is pragmatic, reasoned and doesn't jump up and down crying 'Injustice!' or waving a placard. Much as you might hate this, it's a reasonable technical argument that follows logically from the concept of Free Software itself.

If you want to argue against Free Software on its merits, knock yourself out. I work with both proprietary and Free software all the time, and I see the benefits of both. But when you start pitching a fit and belittling someone else's calm, reasonably stated points without even attempting to address the logic, then you've lost any credibility. Honestly, you can ridicule Stallmann all you like, but you might want to consider what you look like to others as you indulge in this kind of adolescent, pop-collared frat-boy humour.

Re:Gosh!!!

[siride]

Minified JavaScript is for convenience of transport. It's no different from compiled code, which GNU software happily produces.

Re:Gosh!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when the FSF was all about having choice instead of pushing their agenda, when the whole goal was to make sure there was always an alternative so you didn't HAVE to use proprietary if you didn't want to? Wasn't that nice, didn't they seem a hell of a lot less circle loopy in those days? why oh why must every single cause end up ruled by the completely loony tune?

Firstly, Stallman founded the FSF and is still president of it.

Secondly, when was the FSF ever about choice? I think you may be confused with the Open Source Initiative (who have never actually accomplished anything of note interestingly enough); the FSF has been bluntly pushing the whole "proprietary software is immoral" ideology from the beginning, nothing has changed on that front. Why do you think they created the GPL instead of just using BSD 3-clause if they actually ever thought the way you seem to think they did?

Re:Gosh!!!

[ozmanjusri]

I think we can all agree that the FSF reached PETA "sea kittens" levels of batshit

Actually no.

I really like this idea. Basically all they're saying is that a website should tell you if you're entitled to use something like Greasemonkey to replace their javascript with your own clean version (eg if they use crappy, DRM ridden, or annoying javascript). It's a nice, simple way to give control back to the computer user, which is the FSF's raison d'etre.

Simple, clear and functional. I like it.

Re:Gosh!!!

[exomondo]

If I see 'minified' code I assume it's malware.

wow, i'm sure that's really accurate too.

Re:Gosh!!!

[Cajun Hell]

a website should tell you if you're entitled to use something like Greasemonkey to replace their javascript with your own clean version

Why would I ever want some website's opinion about that? I wouldn't even trust a judge's website to correctly guess my decision in the matter of what code I allow my computer to run. Asking websites' opinions just implies they could possibly have a say (or even a vote) in the matter, which is of course completely preposterous.

Who cares about Javascript

[viperidaenz]

That's not even the tip of the iceberg.
The HTML code you download for the vast majority of the web is protected by copyright. The exact same copyright that protects the Javascript. The exact same copyright that gives the GPL license its power to force GPL upon derivatives.

It's not just the Javascript either...

[freezin fat guy]

What about all the non-free images and text taking away your rights?

Wake up people!111

Re:BIOS

[MrEricSir]

Ah yes, nothing says "freedom" like buying a product from the Chinese government.

Re:BIOS

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that Stallman uses a Yeelong lemote right? It's a computer that runs on entirely free (as in freedom) software and firmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemote#Netbook_computers

Re:Stop obfusicated Javascript.

[antifoidulus]

You are aware of what minification is, right? Having nicely formatted javascript also means that you waste a lot of bandwidth sending all that format information that 99.99999999% of users will never look at. There are reverse-minification tools out there if you really want to look at the code.

Say what?

[Tridus]

I'm sacrificing my freedom by loading a webpage that is going to run some code which I can look at with any text editor and see exactly what it's doing (though I may need to de-minify it first)?

Honestly, if that is the biggest threat to my freedom these days, we're in much better shape than I thought!

TFA in this case is surprisingly difficult to understand. It reads like it's aimed at the converted, and the rest of us who are more concerned with "does the site work?" and "are there security concerns?" aren't invited. Either that or I'm really missing something, because I can't fathom why in a million years I would ever care in the slightest about this.