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Comment by ma-int | Hacker News Reader

This is Stallman-esk far removed from reality.

I get the argument (also I think it nonsense) but what will rewriting a sites Javascript do about the server side? That would still be non-free. Or is the argument here that the backend and the API is not important because it's only generating HTML/Json/whatever and that's only "data" so you don't care about it. If so, I would turn that argument around and argue that the non-free Javascript is only an extension of the server side and is only generating data - the DOM.

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The backend is someone else's. It's out of scope, because it's effectively a service.

The frontend code executes in your browser, on your machine. It's in scope of GNU/FSF interest, because the end-users of that code would benefit from the four freedoms. A lot of people who strongly believe in the value of the Four Freedoms try to minimize the amount of non-free code they run, hence the desire for free frontend replacements.

The way I see it, this concern meshes nicely with a more general desire to be able to substitute your own frontend for the one that's served to you. If you imagine a world where people develop and exchange alternative frontends, the users would benefit from these frontends being "free as in freedom".

Of course we're pretty far from that world - but it's not impossible; the term of art is "adversarial interoperability" and I'm a great fan of it.

Stallman has been proved correct so often especially after people mock him, that I now listen to what he says carefully. This might seem silly now, but in 10 years it might be what everyone is asking for.

Can you give an example of a widely mocked Stallman statement that has been proven true?

PRISM and all of the problems described in "the right to read" essay. Many other are probably easily found with a bit of research.

You have not actually suggested any concrete statements. I still have no idea what he has said about Prism, the best I got is that he linked to an article from his website.

The Right to Read is certainly interesting, maybe not the best written short story, and it is still quite far from having come true. But it is a nice bucket list of things to be aware of while shaping the future, so points for that one.

> This might seem silly now, but in 10 years it might be what everyone is asking for.

You may be on to something. Initially I thought the concept was silly, but then I started thinking about Wasm binaries and it starts to become less silly.

In the past, I had a userscript that would just clean up the DOM document on the page (along the lines of document.body.textContent = '') and would just fetch/parse/query the website content anew via XHR and render the content as I liked.

It worked pretty well. And if you keep using some common helper functions, it would not even be that much code. A few tens of lines, or something like that.

You're also within the browser and the origin, with all the cookies and stuff handled for you by the browser, and a ton of platform API at hand, so it's fairly easy to even make your own forms and submit data to the server.

It's also a way to not be accused of creating a derived work from some proprietary CSS/JS that might have been on the website, if you ever publish the userscript.

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