Ask HN: Are websites generally considered to be free or nonfree software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are websites generally considered to be free or nonfree software?

9 pointsOsiris9 comments

I was listening to talk today by Richard Stallman regarding free software. He spoke about Facebook and it dawned on me that nearly every website does not meet the criteria for free software.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

While client-side code for websites is freely available for review, most websites contain server-side code that is not. To me, it seems this would not be free software.

To judge this criteria I went to www.gnu.org and was unable to locate any mechanism for obtaining the source code for the site. There is, for example, a search function. That POSTs a request to the server which runs some algorithm and returns data back. However, it does not seem to be possible to determine what's happening on the server side.

So my question, and maybe I'm looking at this wrong, is do members of the free software movement see web sites as free or non-free? Is there such a thing as a free web site and what would one have to do to make sure that a website could be considered free?

Stallman already addressed this.[1]

In short it depends on the type of network service being provided. He doesn't consider websites that provide information to be non-free because the only processing done by the server is the transmission of information. He does however consider more complex websites such as SaaS portals and web apps to be non-free.

This is also not a very clean situation. For example, who owns the software, the webmaster or the user? Note that in case of desktop software the user always owns at least a license of the software even if only to run a compiled binary for a limited amount of time with restrictions. And further more unlike desktop software you are not running the software on your machine.

Does one have the right to demand the source and modification rights of a piece of software just because it is serving them information despite no processing their information and not running on their machine?

1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

I suppose they're "non-free" in the sense that very few websites provide access to their server-side source & dbs. However, the are a couple of caveats that make them free (in a sense) in my opinion.

1. All final content is free (images, videos, html, css, js/json), an anology would be if in a closed src game you had access to use/download all the 3D models, music, dialogs, voice overs etc.

2. For the vast majority of websites, all the server-side stuff (the "non-free") is built on free / open source technologies, i.e. Apache, postgres, redis, java, ruby, all the frameworks, etc.

3. Information about the web / its technologies on the web is ridiculously ubiqitous, the amount of open/free knowledge, documentation, and resources is for all practical purposes limitless.

so this makes reverse engineering or understanding virtually any website a much simpler task than non web based software, for instance, ERP systems such as SAP which are closed source and fully proprietary. So you are right, however, there's a lot of openess and freedom in the majority "non-free" medium of web software.

1. Only if they're licensed as such, or we're willing to completely disregard IP (which would be very bad).

2. That's nice, and in some cases successful web software causes significant contribution to FOSS (many examples from Facebook), but there's nothing preventing the same from client-side software (id Software's engines for instance).

3. I'd say this is also true for many client-side technologies.

However, the SaaS model allows developers to take advantage of GPL code without an obligation to contribute back, as the y aren't shipping any derivatives of the code, simply providing network access to it. (Whether that's good or bad is left to the reader.)

Many people complain about SaaS for it's strengthened ability to create vendor lock-in, but for non-technical users it's effectively the same. (It doesn't matter of the data's stored on your computer or in a remote database if you don't know how to open it.)

The Affero GPL [1] is a specific license to address this, because existing OSS licenses have no specific clauses regarding network software; the idea of "distribution" is generally considered as "the computer on which the software is running."

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html

Websites are like software : they are non-free unless they're free.

gnu.org is not free. Some websites are free, but they are very rare.

I still got an example[1] (although in french). A website about functionnal programming, featuring courses and a forum. Link to the code is in the footer ("Code du site", i.e. "Website's code") linking to http://gitorious.org/pm/pm

[1] http://progmod.org/

It's quite a bizarre situation really, a lot of websites are built on or leverage open source software and even give shout outs to what they leverage, but really what we do is more closed source / black box than any desktop software ever was.

Reddit's the only actual open source website I know of (aside from forum/blog/etc kind of stuff).

Slashdot too.

In your particular example, gnu.org, the source code is available at:

* http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/www

* http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/?root=www

I have thought about this same thing and I think the source code of gnu.org should be available. In my mind websites are non-free as long as they do not give the back end code.

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