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No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government (fsf.org)
Donald Robertson, writing for Free Software Foundation: Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web. When minified, the code can hide all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks. [...] On March 1st, 2016, the Copyright Office announced a call for comments on an update to their technology infrastructure. We submitted a comment urging them to institute a policy that requires all software they develop and distribute to be free software. Further, we also urged them to not require people to run proprietary software in order to communicate or submit comments to them. Unfortunately, once again, the Copyright Office requires the use of proprietary JavaScript in order to submit the comment and they are only accepting comments online unless a person lacks computer or Internet access. [...] The most absurd part of all this is that other government agencies, while still using Regulations.gov, are perfectly capable of offering alternatives to submission.
This seems to be a case of completely misplaced priorities. The goal should be that the customer/visitor not have to install or use non-free software (such as MS Office, Edge Browser, Acrobat, etc), not the libraries used to render the government website. It might make perfect sense for the government to use non-free software to develop a site, such as their choice of database, OS, etc. Why worry about which javascript libraries are used if they work across all browsers? This seems like something that should be 34,500th on the list of priorities when it comes to the Federal Government's IT priorities.
Oh yeah, and brink back the BLINK Tag as well!
But effectively.
Don't step on the baby.
No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government
You mean TurboTax?
Last year (2014), I had to download Adobe Acrobat to submit a form to the US Treasury dept. The only way you could do this was Acrobat, it used PDF and Adobe proprietary form submission. (I couldn't use Apple Preview.app to fill out the form.)
This year (2015), Treasury added the obvious alternative, a fully on-line Web form. I guess that's progress.
Or is it a client side application written in JavaScript requiring the Microsoft scripting engine?
Things are getting more weird by the day.
Just send the comments to the copyright office using certified mail. It costs a bit but annoys them, and if you get the name of the director then maybe you can require a personal sign-off by the director for the certified mail.
Just let the system work for you.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Propriety JavaScript... REALLY?!
Runs completely in the browser, you download and interpret the plain source code. But because it's minified it's suddenly proprietary? ("we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long")? I think I can find hundreds of 'free' programs that are not commented and are equally readable as a minified javascript file.
Thanks to JavaScript we actually do download the source code. I don't know what the web would look like if vba, flash or java had gotten the upper hand. This only goes to show how out of touch with life they are at the fsf.
No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government
You mean TurboTax?
I'd argue it is not normal either. Though in that case, you still can file manually.
I am not too happy about them making the case that the javascript library is proprietary. There are bigger fight to pick about software freedom without picking the ones that look borderline to many people.
That's not a stretch. Informational sites can do without it fine. Prove me otherwise.
"The Copyright Office requires the use of proprietary JavaScript in order to submit the comment and they are only accepting comments online unless a person lacks computer or Internet access."
I'm sorry, but that collection of words makes no sense. If I lack "computer or Internet access" how the hell am I supposed to send comments online?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Which company owns JavaScript?
That is not what this is about. The problem is requiring proprietary programs written in JavaScript. When minimized, JavaScript is about as indecipherable as binary, so these proprietary programs are basically closed source.
Nobody owns C either. But it can certainly be used to write proprietary closed source programs.
JavaScript is open source at this point... it's kept by the browser makers, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple. They say what's next.
It's a client-side application written in JavaScript using your web browser's scripting engine. But though the scripting engine in IceCat/Firefox and Chromium is free, the client-side application running inside that engine is proprietary, and the LibreJS extension blocks it from running because it is proprietary.
Tax forms used to be found at every post office and library in the 80s... now with TurboTax so cheap (and free to some users) there isn't much need for that anymore. Obscure forms exist, and are downloaded by TurboTax when you indicate you're in that kind of situation.
Yep, you need Windows or Mac to run TurboTax's download... how does a Linux-only user fill out their taxes?
HTML is considered a cultural work, not computer program. Free Software Foundation is not as adamant about cultural works being free as it is about computer programs and their manuals being free. For example, its own license list recommends publication of opinion works under CC BY-ND, a license that is non-free because it prohibits derivative works.
Even if it weren't minified, is the script licensed in a way that permits you to make and share your improvements?
What is really annoying is that the US patent and trademark office (USPTO) still requires many of its users to use browsers running Java (not Javascript) for many applications. These days, that means running either Firefox or IE (classic). Persons using iOS or Android are out of luck.
JavaScript is not the problem; proprietary JavaScript is. The JavaScript fragment in the cited document is distributed under GPLv3, a free software license. It loads Piwik, which is distributed under a 3-clause BSD license, which is also a free software license.
Sure, minimized JavaScript is hard to decipher, but it's still easier to read than your average Perl program!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They're complaining about minified JavaScript. Please shut up.
That's not the complaint. A minified script is an "executable", and FSF has no problem with a minified script that has a comment at the top linking to its source code and stating a free software license. The complaint is about a minified script that offers no source code or prohibits users from sharing improvements to it.
Or ask everyone to also host their debug symbols for the minified code
If debug symbols let the user derive source code (defined in GPLv2 and v3 as "the preferred form of a program for making modifications to it") from a minified script, and users know that they are permitted to make and share improvements to the script, FSF has no problem with it.
There's a reasonable level of expectation of technology that people are gradually pushed to use, whether it's proprietary or not. When something becomes so common that everyone has relatively barrier-free and low-cost access to it, you've got to give in even if you're the government or providing a public service.
We might as well take the truly principled stand and object that interacting with the government requires having telephone service (!), paying for postage stamps (!), or paying for the bus to get to city hall (!).
Open in Chrome. Hit F12. Choose Sources. Click the JS file you want to inspect. Click { } for "Pretty Print". Done.
What was the issue again? Oh wait, there isn't one.
Uninstall or disable LibreJs then.
Not everyone wants to compute like they were a member of the "bearded computer priesthood" at the MIT AI lab in 1972.
Stallmans axes...well his philosophies actually take choices AWAY from the users in favor of supposed freedoms they can really only take advantage of IF they are also members of "the bearded priesthood"
And I say that as someone who DOES use Linux.
Even though it is a textual encoding of a program in JavaScript, it still isn't necessarily free software for two reasons:
As for 'having to use Acrobat' - do you mean the FREE Adobe Reader that Adobe has spent their own money on to help make it work for folks like you? You could also have gone with FoxIT, tools from Global Graphics (who developed Microsoft's ill fated XPS system), or any one of a number of other free PDF tools that would allow you to fill out and save a PDF based form.
By "free", do you mean merely "without charge", or do you mean "giving users the right and ability to make and share improvements"? FSF is fighting for the latter. Which PDF tool under a free software license offers form filling?
Do you still need to go through commercial services to get text of legal decisions?
Here's another: I have a handgun, and would like to practice without going and dropping $50 at a range. I live in a rural county (where it's perfectly legal to shoot guns on your own property as long as you're outside a town limit), but in a town. I am 90% sure that shooting in the public river bottoms WCA is legal, so I called my county sheriff's office to confirm. I was passed to a "Sergeant (something or other)" and left a message. No reply. Called again a couple of weeks later, no reply. Called a 3rd time, probably months later, no reply. Each time transferred to the same Sergeant. I now believe that's a dead end voicemail for "shit we don't want to deal with".
I know it has to be true in a practical sense, but how can "ignorance of the law" logically not be an excuse when:
- new laws & precedent are written faster than any single human could be expected to read them all
- law officers won't even answer a direct question about "is this legal or no?"
-Styopa
The problem, as I understand the summary, is that only people without a computer and Internet access are allowed to use mail for this.
Uninstall or disable LibreJs then.
Not everyone wants to compute like they were a member of the "bearded computer priesthood" at the MIT AI lab in 1972.
Stallmans axes...well his philosophies actually take choices AWAY from the users in favor of supposed freedoms they can really only take advantage of IF they are also members of "the bearded priesthood"
And I say that as someone who DOES use Linux.
GNU/Linux
But to the layman, is any javascript, minified or not, any less "proprietary"?
If the source code for a minified JavaScript program is available under a free software license, a layman can in theory learn JavaScript and then make and share improvements to the program. If not, the layman will instead die waiting for the copyright to expire.
What exactly would be the [...] approved alternative?
A minified script with a comment at the top linking to the source code and stating which free software license applies.
Click the JS file you want to inspect. Click { } for "Pretty Print". Done.
Sure, and you can use a hexdump or disassembler to get the "source" to a binary program. That doesn't mean that you can understand what it is doing, or see security holes, or modify it, or fix bugs.
When something becomes so common that everyone has relatively barrier-free and low-cost access to it, you've got to give in...
When jumping off a bridge becomes so common that everyone has relatively barrier-free and low-cost access to it, you've got to give in...
FSF would argue that lacking the right to make and share improvements is a "barrier", and thus a minified script with no suitable license isn't "relatively barrier-free".
We might as well take the truly principled stand and object that interacting with the government requires having telephone service
This is part of why the United States subsidizes telephone service for low-income citizens in a program officially called Lifeline and nicknamed Reaganphone.
One should not be required to use electronic anything, ever. Pen and paper, yes, handwritten notes, ought to suffice. For everyone, on their choice, not the government's. (Should I mention that noted late computer scientist E.W. Dijkstra reverted to fountain pen when everyone else went to typewriter? His choice.)
I'm not saying you shouldn't use electronic anything, I'm saying you shouldn't be required to use electronic anything. Beyond that, yes, when governmental agencies offer electronic whatnots, they'd better make sure all the required protocols are 1) open and published, or they publish them themselves, 2) of decent quality, and 3) not bound to any specific software, architecture, whatever. (Note that "html" is published but a rotten standard, so actually a bad example. So is redmond's ooxml abortion.)
The trouble is most "digitalisation" is tech- and hype focused, and tends to forget about function, even the customer. For businesses in a competetive market that's one thing. For governments, with their monopolistic outlook and their tendency to force everyone else to do their bidding exactly their way for no reason, it's another.
GNU/Linux :^)
Touche, Anonymous Coward, touche.
However shouldn't that be :^)==>
To represent his beard?
Oh come on. Assembly I would accept, but minified javascript as indecipherable as binary? What a far stretch
However shouldn't that be :^)==>
Until I saw your explanatory comment about the beard, I honestly thought you were trying to call him a dickhead...
"Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web."
This is just sensationalist bullshit of the highest order. Trashdot strikes again.
Minification is just striping out everything that isn't strictly needed to make the code run and shrinking it so it takes less time to transport. The only way this is a threat is if you have a fear of text editors.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Not a dickhead. Sure I think some of his "zealotry" isn't practical for most people or at times productive, but I don't think he's a dickhead. He means well, but he is still to some extent living in computings past...and his "Bearded priesthoodness" is what allows him to do that because he doesn't use computers the way the masses do.
I reject your government, and substitute my own ... "strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
it would just be cheaper to send laptops to everyone without modern browsers
So you get a hand-written letter back from deep in the Appalachians:
Dear Sir,
Thanks for the fancy, new-fangled typewriter. Where does the ribbon go?
Have gnu, will travel.
Do Donald Robertson is saying we should ban JS minification from government websites?
The problem he says exists has nothing to do with proprietary code, it's the obfuscation that is the problem.
You had me at "no one should have to use proprietary software".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think I have found more bugs in other people's programs from staring at disassembled code than from staring at source code. Then again, that is because most of the source code I have access to is from things that tend to do what I want (Linux, etc.), while I mostly tend to disassemble code that is not doing what I want (calculators & other hardware I decided to hack, mostly). As a result, the main thing I find preventing modification is code being in ROM (but that can be worked around, even on Harvard-architecture systems).
Of course, most people who end up trying to fix a bug will probably have access to the source code (or else not bother trying), & many people do not have the time or knowledge to figure out someone else's binary blob, so your point stands.
Hold on a second... Let's suppose I take some code that's licensed under the GPL (any language) and I'm creating a derivative work. Of course, I must make the source code freely available, but consider the following set of hypotheticals.
(1) During the creation of my derivative work, I embed comments into the source file at various locations.
(2) During the creation of my derivative work, I make a branch for debugging/exploration and embed various comments and perhaps insert debugging traces such as printf("%s %d\n", __LINE__, __FILE__); all over the code. The branch was solely for my own edification, so after I am edified, I discard it and work off the main branch. I never distribute the binaries derived from this branch to anyone.
(3) During the creation of my derivative work, I take notes in a spiral bound notebook describing how the code works. These notes may even refer to the code by filename and line number.
(4) During the creation of my derivative work, I take notes in another application that I save apart from the source code. These notes may even refer to the code by filename and line number.
(5) I do (3), but I also write/use a fancy editor that finds comments by file/line and overlays them next to the source on screen, but doesn't modify the source file.
Under which conditions do I have to release the source with my comments? I'm pretty sure I do for (1) but not (2) or (3). The last two are just meant as an exercise in proving that GPL makes distinctions that don't matter much in principle. After all, if you can refuse to release the "comments" for (5) then it's operationally no different than (1) at all.
Plus these sort of things amuse me. Things that have the same effects should be subject to the same rules. Things that have the same process should be subject to the same rules. But ultimately it doesn't work out ...
I find this use of the term "proprietary" to be significantly different from the usual intended meaning of the term.
Usually, "proprietary" means intellectual property belonging to a private organization, with a harsh hand taken to prevent reverse engineering and the stated assertion (either in EULAs or otherwise) that no use can be made in any way of reverse engineered output without being subject to legal action.
Here, "proprietary" apparently means "hard to understand" since everything else does not apply—not a private organization, no need to reverse engineer since it's an interpreted language, etc. By this standard, all of the perl and assembly code in the universe is "proprietary" since it's not written with forty character variable names.
Seems a stretch.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
JavaScript is loaded client-side and can be downloaded and viewed as plain text, so it's certainly not closed source. Minified JavaScript is just JS code that's harder to understand due to function/variable substitution and whitespace stripping and again it's not closed source.
I don't know if you can actually buy commercial JavaScript libraries, but if you did, all the source code would be sent to the public every time a page was loaded with the JS loaded from it, so again it isn't closed source, but technically could be proprietary (i.e. it can only be used on authorised sites and anyone putting it on another unauthorised site is breaking the licence terms).
What's the difference, though, between custom HTML/CSS and custom JS in terms of licencing? All of them could be developed in-house and have the same "proprietary" licencing (i.e. can't be copied and used on other sites) - after all it's illegal to clone someone's site and host it elsewhere without permission surely?
I think the FSF have got this one wrong - if there was a way to make JS closed source, then they might have a point, but claiming JS can be "proprietary" just because it's minified or developed in-house (and not usable on other sites - after all, a lot of money could have been spent developing - or purchasing - the JS) is barking up the wrong tree. As long as the JS works cross-platform on the major browsers, I see no issue myself.
Uninstall or disable LibreJs then.
Not everyone wants to compute like they were a member of the "bearded computer priesthood" at the MIT AI lab in 1972.
Stallmans axes...well his philosophies actually take choices AWAY from the users in favor of supposed freedoms they can really only take advantage of IF they are also members of "the bearded priesthood"
And I say that as someone who DOES use Linux.
GNU/Linux
I what if I run a plan9 userland you insensitive clod.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
That's unfair. Why single out the proprietary stuff?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress and as such is part of the legislative branch of the US Government and ultimately reports to Congress. The federal agencies that most people think of and interact with, such as the Patent and Trademark Office or the Veterans Administration, are part of the executive branch which ultimately reports to the President. The PTO specifically is an office within the Department of Commerce. I suspect the inability to use is due to this separation.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Wake up! You still think you're free?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
and throws a childish tantrum if his lectures don't go as smoothly as he would like.
Oh? While I know about his tour/lecture rider:
https://groups.google.com/a/my...
I hadn't heard about any tantrums. I'm not saying he doesn't have tantrums, but only that I hadn't heard of them. I know a bit about autistic spectrum folks so it would not surprise me if he does have a tantrum now and then.
The problem with posting as a registered user, which you seem oddly proud of, is that you can't just come out and say it for fear of negative moderation.
While I am fairly proud of posting logged in and standing by what I say, I'm not afraid of negative moderation. I've been negative-modded for saying things about Stallman. Including my first comment in this thread, it got modded down at first. And I tend to get modded down when I state my opinions about PC gaming and PC gamers among other things. And I get modded down when I confront those I consider sexist/misogynist when they start going on about an "SJW conspiracy"
I HAVE posted AC in specific circumstances. I do it VERY rarely though.
You don't understand. People want to do what THEY want to do with computers and sometimes non-libre software or walled garden hardware is what lets them do it.
You may argue that we shouldn't have such things, but we don't live in the ivory tower of the 1972 MIT AI Lab, where computing was controlled by a bearded priesthood who "shared". In fact the FSF exists because some of that bearded priesthood decided they wanted to make some money and believed that not-sharing was in their companies best interests.
Stallman stayed at MIT, and thusly lived in an artificial bubble of not having to pay for things so never "grew out" of that old mindset.
I think Free/Libre software is a good thing, but there is always going to be software that isn't because we don't live in an ideal post-scarcity world. (In fact Stallman mentions post-scarcity in his writings)
It is copyright law which takes AWAY the choices.
It is copyright law that allows the GPL to EXIST in the first place. Stallman himself says this.
Who says the minifier used didn't add "all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks" to the code?
Someone paranoid about that could choose to download and execute the source file instead of the minified file, just as someone paranoid about a particular GNU/Linux distribution's binary packaging could bootstrap everything from source. (And if you name drop Ken Thompson, I'll name drop David A. Wheeler.)
What good does being able to legally share and modify the code that runs a government website?
The point is that you can modify the copy of the code that runs on your computer while retaining compatibility with the server-side back-end, and then you can can share the improvement with other users of the same government web application who can run an extension that substitutes your version for the government's version.
I never distribute the binaries derived from this branch to anyone.
Under the GPL, if you never distribute object code,* you never trigger the obligation to distribute complete corresponding source code to the public. If you do distribute object code of your modified version, a judge will determine whether your added comments make up an essential part of "the preferred form of the work for making modifications".
* One exception involves server-side code under the AGPL, which treats publicly performing a modified version over a network the same way as distributing object code.