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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

It won't satisfy rms but seriously: Apple Maps, which is actually good now.

The Maps app on Macs and iOS does not use JavaScript. It also supports satellite and 3d views, and the street view shipping in a month looks better than what Google offers:

https://twitter.com/rvdsteege/status/1139264604918485005

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He doesn't want to use Javascript because he doesn't want non-free software (the JS code) running on his computer.

Using a proprietary software on a proprietary OS is not going to be any better.

Serious question: why is JavaScript not free (as in ‘freedom’ to use)? Who is the owner of JS and do web browsers have to pay for it?

edit: tried to make my questions clearer :)

You can read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.

Note that the discussion here is about JavaScript code, not JavaScript the programming language (there seems to have been some confusion in this thread).

Also note that being able to read the code doesn't entail that the code is free as in freedom (i.e., released under a corresponding license). If you share some non-trivial[0] code of yours on GitHub, or deploy a website with your own non-trivial JS code, it still fully belongs to you, and people are not free to reuse it without asking you.

[0]: you probably cannot claim much for a hello world even if you wrote it yourself

Thanks for that link and info. My reading is that it seems the GNU’s/FSF’s issue with JavaScript is that the code is not always available (to view/peruse):

“It is possible to release a JavaScript program as free software, by distributing the source code under a free software license. If the program is self-contained—if its functioning and purpose are independent of the page it came in—that is fine; you can copy it to a file on your machine, modify it, and visit that file with a browser to run it. But that is an unusual case.” [0]

JS code can obviously be client-side (generally readable in a browser via View Source, but not always, unless I am mistaken) or server-side (not generally readable, unless explicitly shared by the devs).

But based on [1] and [2] and [3], it appears that JS the language is owned and maintained by ECMA, which is a not-for-profit standards org.

So then I’m still a bit confused as to who whose lawyers would be coming after you if you published some JS code on Github or your own web-site? Not the ECMA’s right?

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecma_International [3] https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-owner-of-javascript

You can publish as much of your own javascript code as you want under any license on your website or github, or anywhere. The issue they have is not with the ownership of javascript the language. The issue is that if you wanted to take the frontend code to Facebook, Google Maps, Office 365, or something like that, and modify it to create your own version, you have two problems. One, that it probably isn't allowed by the license and the Facebook/Google/Microsoft lawyers could come after you if you tried to redistribute it. Two, it's likely it will be very difficult to attempt to do that because the code is intentionally obfuscated by a javascript minifier.

Thanks for that.

So really their (FSF/GNU) issue is not with JS at all, but with devs who don’t licence their code under a free software licence? In other words, who enforce the copyright of their own algorithms?

What I also find a bit confusing (inconsistent?) with this stance is that a dev can do a reasonable amount of interesting things with HTML+CSS+SVG (obviously there are limits on the ‘interaction’ side of things), and assumably devs can also licence their HTML+CSS+SVG under whatever licence they wish: so then why pick on JS?

I think they would if we got to a point where HTML+CSS+SVG alone was turing-complete and became useful enough to perform general computations, and large programs were written in it.

Try downloading their code, use it on your site and tell us what their lawyers thought of that argument after you've brought to court for copyright infringement.

You are misunderstanding Stallman's argument. He doesn't have a problem with Javascript. He has a problem with non-free javascript. He probably would have even more of a problem with Apple Maps because it's an entirely proprietary program.

Note that Look Around only supports a small set of locations currently.

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