Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

neilv

Unfortunately, I think this is a phenomenon with the FSF...

They want to raise a point X, which could in theory be communicated in a persuasive way.

But they can't resist also mentioning their zero-tolerance on unrelated point Y.

I think the Y makes people tend to go WTF, and then dismiss both X and Y.

Every time now, I'm thinking "You don't have to always mention Y!"

On at least a couple occasions, I actually abandoned an argument I was making on some X in a venue, because some FSF person jumped in with a Y. If I didn't know they were a true-believer in Y and at least sympathetic to X, I'd think they were trying to discredit both.

The FSF has some great principles, but a lot of the communications don't seem to be calibrated for me, nor for my understanding of anyone else.

View on HN

I've been saying this for years and years. [1] The FSF / GNU folks are only preaching to the choir and don't really have any positive solutions.

They're happy to tell you what not to do, what software not to use (and what software they won't use) but that's it.

Their communications are calibrated for true believers only. They rely heavily on the reader/audience 1) agreeing with a fairly extreme position relative to the mainstream, and 2) the idea that the FSF/GNU has a position of authority/trust with the audience.

What's annoying is that I agree with them on the idea that deprecating JPEG-XL is counter to user interests and that Google has too much power. But they could've led with IceCat and made a more pragmatic case that might resonate with a larger audience. Hilariously, though, "building binary packages for Windows and MacOS currently requires nonfree software, so we no longer distribute binary packages for those platforms."

So... if you're already happy to be an Orthodox Free Software True Believer then you have an alternative. If you aren't, well, too damn bad. If you're a budding free software fan but happen to have a macOS machine or Windows machine your parents supplied, too bad. If you'd like to make a work computer slightly more free, too bad. Etc.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100703110224/http://www.linux-... [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

> If you're a budding free software fan but happen to have a macOS machine or Windows machine your parents supplied, too bad.

There's much more to this. I have tried for well over a decade to run Linux as my daily driver on my laptop and gave up in 2018 January and just run Windows + WSL, especially since WSL2 this is quite good. There's always something that doesn't work. (And yes, if all you connect your laptop to is a normal wifi then your experience might differ. My problems were with Bluetooth, enterprise wifi and multifunctional printers.) It's entirely possible some people would prefer not running Linux because the manufacturers refuse to pay much attention to it.

I have been on Linux since 1993. Still running it on servers and router. It's still not the year of Linux on the desktop.

FSF is the uncompromising idealist for better and for worse. It takes some serious balls to live life the way RMS does, fetching HTML by sending email and all that. No one else wants to be that extreme, so even though they value computing freedom in the abstract they compromise and tolerate little injustices in the name of getting things done.

At the end of the day RMS is still right though. Those little injustices add up, the corporations creep up on you slowly and next thing you know you're being surveilled by the javascript you used to see as harmless, and soon you learn how to tolerate that too. Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago but it doesn't matter because stuff like RYF certification is irrelevant and will only ever apply to machines that must 20 years old by now because manufacturers don't care and everyone is on mobile now anyway.

That's assuming RMS isn't just LARPing.

The Javascript issue never made sense to me. You are reading a non-free document to begin with, what difference does it make if it is running Javascript or not? If they wanna spy on you they can do that with HTML and CSS just as well. Even releasing the spying software under GPL wouldn't stop it from spying on you.

The party one should be angry about here is the browser, which provides little to no tools to show the user what is going on and provides no real means to stop it. This is quite a bit different from the early web days when every browser had a "Javascript off" and style sheet selector right in the main menu by default.

> Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago

Not far enough. Ever since the whole world moved to "software as a service" and your computer has become little more than a thin terminal to some Google/Facebook/whatever-service FSF started to feel quite out of touch. Sure, they tell you "don't do that", but while that isn't wrong, it's not exactly helpful either. Many service simply have to run on a computer that you don't own and we need rules to govern that. None of the Free Software licenses help here.

FSF never bothered to create any kind of licenses or best practices that deal with how those services should work. They are stuck in dealing with software freedom problems of the 90s, not the problems we face today. Luckily we do have the GDPR now, but the FSF had nothing to do with that and never provided anything similar.

> The Javascript issue never made sense to me. [...] Even releasing the spying software under GPL wouldn't stop it from spying on you.

Exactly. The licence is not the only problem with javascript on the web because you can't use your freedoms in practice anyway since the code is automatically downloaded and executed when you load the page in a common web browser.

What we need is something that allows people to choose what code to run, similarly to how software traditionally is downloaded and executed in two separate steps. We need to get away from the assumption that people will run all code you throw at them when they visit your site. Then maybe licences on javascript can start to make more sense.

> because you can't use your freedoms in practice anyway

Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided one. A convenient extension to do this might not exist yet, but you could block the website's provided JavaScript with uBlock Origin / uMatrix and use your fork with ViolentMonkey or another *Monkey extension. And distribute your fork on some user scripts repository (for instance).

Free software is not (only) about avoiding spying. It's about running the code you want to run for any endeavor you can have, and be able to study and distribute your modifications.

I totally agree with your last paragraph and I agree something should be done to deal with how (web) software is distributed and run.

> Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided one.

Ok, that's possible to do but it's not a solution to the problem because:

- You would not have much use of it because javascript is often very dependent on the web page and the server so if any of those changes, your script breaks. There is no expectation that people do this so the website owners have no reason to keep a stable API.

- Only the people who use that extension or browser benefit from having that freedom. Compare this to traditional software where forks can easily be created and maintained and get more popular than the original fork. Now people who don't even know about the forks will benefit from it because they will likely use the fork that gets popular which can be the better one. An example of this is software distributions (like Debian and so on) that may modify upstream software in a way that benefits all users, even the ones who are not aware. That would be extremely difficult to do with all websites on the web without things constantly breaking.

I agree that its not practical nor satisfactory indeed.

GNU has some interesting things to say about this.

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

However this page is a little out of date :)

>The party one should be angry about here is the browser, which provides little to no tools to show the user what is going on

Wait, what? The browser is the single best platform in existence for showing people what is going on behind the scenes - hit F12 and enjoy. Very few other software projects give users these kinds of tools, available at runtime.

But if you refuse to use software because of religious reasons, you may not be aware of this.

None of that is accessible in the normal user interface, nor is there an easy way to disable any of that stuff from happening in the first place. As said, we used to have buttons to disable Javascript, CSS, image loading and cookies straight in the main menu, no addons or developer tools needed.

We wouldn't have needed EU cookie banner laws if browser didn't stop making cookie storage obvious. Lynx is about the only browser left that still makes cookie storage an explicit action. A Stop button that actually stops a webpage from executing Javascript in the background would be welcome as well.

Browser have long given up trying to be document viewers that serve the user and just turned into advertisement displays.

You can turn off JavaScript execution in all browsers by going to about:config and setting javascript.enabled=false. It's not a button, but I think it's okay.

Browser have long given up trying to be document viewers...

I know, and isn't it wonderful? Its very cool to have a truly cross-platform, graphical, debuggable environment! Plus the two best ones are open source (Firefox and Chromium).

Except they compromised on the very issue of media formats. They are making an unnecessary fight between two royalty-free formats, yet compromised and are hosting videos in royalty-bearing formats in their website. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-fsfs-approach-to-usi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com