Comment by film42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by film42 | Hacker News Reader

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> Google Docs downloads into your machine a JavaScript program which measures half a megabyte, in a compacted form that we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long. The source code of a program is the preferred form for modifying it; the compacted code is not source code, and the real source code of this program is not available to the user.

I love Stallman and what he stands for, but this is a bit misleading. Shipping obfuscated source code is NOT the same thing as shipping some prepackaged binary. I can still dig through the Google Docs source and pull out anything I find valuable. No one is going to stop me. Furthermore, obfuscation of JavaScript is intended to reduce network load for Google. I mean, yes, obfuscation has a side-effect of "limiting interested parties," but to reiterate my point: it's not like Google is sending me PageRank as obfuscate C code each time I load their homepage.

>Shipping obfuscated source code is NOT the same thing as shipping some prepackaged binary.

Yes, it is. Obfuscated source code, like a binary, is not the corresponding source code.

"The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."

See: https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Absolutely not! Just because it doesn't jive with GPL doesn't mean JS obfuscation is no longer source. It's not like compiling a C program without debugger symbols. It's the same high-level JS language, it's just "harder to read." The point of saying it's "not source code" is just wrong.

> Absolutely not! Just because it doesn't jive with GPL doesn't mean JS obfuscation is no longer source.

It's not the source code, because its not the first code produced before any automated transformation. Its an intermediate form that happens to still remain text, and remain legal code in the same language as the source code.

You can use a disassembler to get source code out of your binary. If I distribute my binaries with corresponding assembly source (which I obtained from a disassembler), am I distributing my source code?

> It's not like compiling a C program without debugger symbols.

It definitely can be exactly isomorphic to just that via emscripten.

Where do you draw the line? Isn't compiled byte code just harder to read also?

> Shipping obfuscated source code is NOT the same thing as shipping some prepackaged binary. I can still dig through the Google Docs source and pull out anything I find valuable.

If thats the case then you can make the case that any software is open source. After all you can run your favorite program through a debugger and get all the machine calls. And someone can dig through them and convert it to C. From a human pov, minification isn't all that different from compilation.

>I can still dig through the Google Docs source and pull out anything I find valuable. No one is going to stop me.

Yeah, and you can use a dissasembler on a binary. Noone is going to stop you either.

Both cases put difficulties and slow down your understanding of the program AND are not the original code the programmers worked with.

In many cases, both of these actions are also in violation of the license/ToS for the software/website.

Sure. The "noone is going to stop me" was literal, not about legal issues.

No one will stop you from looking. They will stop you from making it useful to other people.

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