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Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

Admittedly, I'm looking at this situation from within my comfortable bubble of a GNU system in which I only use software for which I have a source-to-binary mapping through GNU Guix.

JavaScript applications are the exception in my environment and they threaten to burst that shiny bubble.

Aside: I really think that the terms "open" and "closed" are imprecise and confusing, which is why I avoid them. With deterministic builds and free software I have a mapping from source to corresponding binary; so while the binary may not be directly editable (or "closed") it still is free software and I could edit the corresponding source to obtain a new binary. In my opinion the problem really is one of practical software freedom, which has never been achieved in a satisfying way for web applications.

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I guess I mostly agree. I just think that theoretically it should be able for web applications to be open source just as much as our GNU systems are, and that it's a shame that in practice, this is often not the case.

The javascript part of web applications are pretty fairly open source. Most libraries are OS licensed (probably MIT) and include plain source along with the minified versions that can be verified, forked, modified or redistributed as desired. Any browser allows the source of any page to be viewed or saved locally - and I would bet dollars to donuts that even with minifiers, most javascript running on the web is still plaintext. Browsers allow turning off javascript entirely, or overriding it with custom scripts using plugins like Greasemonkey, which is a lot more freedom than most native apps provide.

The only problem from a free software perspective is that not every line of javascript in the universe is explicitly linkable to a GPL license in a static file, as one would find in, say, a C library. But in every other way (I would argue, in every way that really matters) javascript in the browser is either as free or more free than other languages in their respective environments.

Don't forget that there's also a large server component that's usually closed source :)

The web throws a monkey wrench into a lot of assumptions the free software model seems to make about what software is - obviously you can't download the source of an entire server stack and compile it, much less rewrite and redistribute it, but that would seem to be what would be required for the web to be 'free.'

Ok, technically you could but that would be insane. Even if you consider how much FOSS exists on servers, it's impossible to ever be certain what is running the logic of a site unless you can run it locally, which defeats the whole point of the web.

But arguments that javascript in particular is hostile to user freedom seem a bit overstated... and even Stallman doesn't suggest the answer is getting rid of it altogether. Although he does seem to believe that only running free javascript somehow makes it safe to run... which isn't true.

> The web throws a monkey wrench into a lot of assumptions the free software model seems to make about what software is - obviously you can't download the source of an entire server stack and compile it, much less rewrite and redistribute it, but that would seem to be what would be required for the web to be 'free.'

This looks like a strawman.

For a user of a service there is no difference between a service provider that uses free software and a service provider that uses proprietary software. Proprietary software primarily harms the user of that software --- and in this case it is the service provider, not the user with a browser.

There are different concerns to outsouring computing and/or communication to services, but these are not the same concerns that apply with the use of proprietary software.

JavaScript applications, however, do run on the user's machine and thus the usual concerns about running non-free software apply.

> [Stallman] does seem to believe that only running free javascript somehow makes it safe to run... which isn't true.

I haven't heard him argue that position. Free software obviously can be faulty and it can be unsafe to use.

A lot of sites are transpired these days, so you have the 'source' but it's generated code

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