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Comment by justinlardinois | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking this too. You can read the HTML and CSS of any website, but there's likely no licensing information attached to it. And you'll never see the server side code of most websites.

What's the reason that's not considered a problem? Is it because it's not actually running on the user's computer? Or because you can think of the resulting HTML/CSS as output of the program?

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> What's the reason that's not considered a problem

It's considered a problem:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

> The original idea of web servers wasn't to do computing for you, it was to publish information for you to access. Even today this is what most web sites do, and it doesn't pose the SaaSS problem, because accessing someone's published information isn't doing your own computing.

The more grey area that exists the harder it is for me to understand what Stallman's beliefs actually are. "doing your own computing", why is that the center of his moral beliefs?

The longer time passes, the more it feels like Stallman is holding a lifelong vendetta because he had trouble debugging some printers.

Because laws around digital intellectual property are profoundly different from physical goods, even when the goods are intellectual property like a book.

Consider a trivial example. I bought an iOS SSH app called prompt. The authors subsequently release a new version and removed the old one from the store. It works great on my phone and I decided decided to put it on another device. Guess what? It's not on the App Store any more, and my options for using it are limited.

If you log in to the App Store on that device, go to Updates -> Purchased -> Not on this iPhone (or iPad, etc.) you should be able to install it on the new device.

Well if the FSF had its way prompt would never have been made to the degree of polish and quality that it was, because there would have been no financial incentive, no?

Really? So that's why so many of those fancy proprietary web sites run on fully opensource free stacks?

In the same way that Red Hat isn't a thing, right?

> The longer time passes, the more it feels like Stallman is holding a lifelong vendetta because he had trouble debugging some printers.

That ad hominem is uncalled for.

The point of "doing your computing" is the concept of freedom within the Free Software movement.

According to RMS, "freedom is having control over your life". "In a computer system there are just two possibilities: either the user controls the program or the program controls the user".

So, "doing your own computing" is "having control over your life", and thus, having freedom.

My point, that I didn't articulate well, is that over time everything is going to be computing. Some day your pants will have a CPU in it. Do you not have control over your life if proprietary pants software cools your legs when it's hot?

So it seems that the definition of "what is software" has to constantly be redefined OR the whole Free Software thing becomes more and more a luddite idea.

> Do you not have control over your life if proprietary pants software cools your legs when it's hot?

Do you have the source code to firmware on the chip in the pants? Can you install a custom version? That would be consistent with the FSF's viewpoint. They want the user to have full access and control over the software he uses in all devices he uses.

To put a bit of a finer point on it: Stallman has said (paraphrasing; I'm having trouble finding a good source) that self-contained embedded firmware/microcode without an update mechanism isn't "software" in a sense relevant to the Free Software movement. Rather, it's equivalent to a hardwired state machine, and we can judge its behavior as a single object, notwithstanding what its architecture looks like internally.

When did he say this? In the 80s when he established the FSF or recently when the issue came up? This is my entire point, over time the definition of "software" has to be re-evaluated to justify the existence of this ethos; if one man defines what is "software" under this philosophy it doesn't feel like a real philosophy at all.

From his site:

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain to the local people why they should migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push them hard, because annoying them is not the way to convince them.

Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue, which would arise just the same even if they did use free software. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which give them any data about me.)

That's my policy about using a machine once in a while. If I were to use it for an hour every day, that would no longer be "once in a while" — it would be regular use. At that point, I would start to feel the heavy hand of any nonfree software in that computer, and feel the duty to arrange to use a liberated computer instead.

Likewise, if I were to ask or lead someone to set up a computer for me to use, that would make me ethically responsible for its software load. In such a case I insist on free software, just as if the machine were mine.

As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer.

It's not like he doesn't consider it software, just that he's OK with not being Free. That said, small details at the edges hardly invalidate a philosophy.

Over time this will be unsurmountable; you'll not have the time to audit everything you contact (it all can be software and you not even know it). The only solution is to live an isolationist lifestyle.

The idea is that we'll verify things as a community; not necessarily that we each have to individually audit things

Remember that rms mainly opposes the distribution of proprietary software. His main goal has always been to have enough FOSS written to satisfy the needs of users, allowing them to avoiding having to choose between performing some task or keeping their rights.

I draw exactly the opposite conclusion: over time everything is going to be computing, yes, and so the whole Free Software thing becomes more and more a fundamental, essential, political idea.

If the objects and systems surrounding you are controlled by software, then your personal freedom to make your own personal choices is determined by your ability to control the software that controls your environment.

I think what it comes down to more than anything is equality. What happens when someone discovers a breakthrough to reverse aging or to improve cognitive functioning? Should that information be public, or only accessible to the rich?

Now take the same analogy to computing. How many people have access to entire data centers to run algorithms for machine learning and AI? Doing your own computing is the opposite of that. Instead of sharing your information, it's saying we should build software and applications that run locally and that are open source so that we can audit the code. It's sad that the norm is everything in the cloud these days without any concern for privacy.

Much HTML and CSS nowadays is not really readable, but minified or obfuscated. It's not the 1990s where reading other people's static HTML was a good way to learn how to make your own websites.

Eh. HTML and CSS is the easy part - you can't really obfuscated, only minify it to remove whitespace, which is easily reversible. All great browser dev tools have built in ways to unminify web assets. And it's even easier for HTML and CSS as they're easily viewable in parsed form (DOM).

My point is that HTML and CSS rarely is "source code" these days, (i.e. "the preferred form for modification") but the output of a tool. Back when we were using assemblers instead of compilers, assembly was considered source code, but now it's an opaque object. It is most HTML and CSS these days: opaque objects. If nothing else, the identifiers and CSS selectors can be easily obfuscated.

CSS is often compiled from other languages like SASS.

HTML is often built from complicated templates.

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