Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the 'Javascript trap' posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. 'It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software,' Stallman writes. 'But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome.'"

Re:he is right.

[radarsat1]

I think it's pretty clear, if you just keep the fundamental principles of free software in mind. If you use software, you should have the freedom to modify it and run a modified version. Just remember that, and this article will make a lot more sense to you.

I think he enunciates quite clearly the "danger": that we are becoming more and more dependent on software that is temporarily downloaded to our computers in a semi-obfuscated manner and executed to perform non-trivial tasks. This is not quite breaking the "freedom to modify" principle, since technically the source code is available, but he's calling it a trap because in practice it's extremely difficult to get in there and modify a web application since current browsers don't provide an easy way to do it, and the "source code" is almost impossible to read.

Look -- people are calling him crazy for this but I don't know why. (Possibly because they'll jump on any opportunity to call him crazy.) But frankly he's right. If you value the ability to modify software that you use, web applications don't make it easy to do. Not only that, but they can change on you while you're in the middle of using them, making it difficult for any local modifications (based on GreaseMonkey e.g), to "stick".

I don't think he comes off as crazy at all in this article, nor is he even suggesting we don't use JavaScript or anything silly like that. He's merely pointing out some potential problems with web applications vis-a-vis the freedom to modify, and providing a possible solution in the form of metadata.

In fact I'd say this is one of the more practical and shorter things I've seen him write, so I can't understand why people are jumping all over this.

Re:FFS

[maeka]

This is from the man who by his own admission doesn't use a web browser. He's becoming more and more like the Ayatollah - issuing edicts about things that he barely comprehends and has never actually tried himself.

Why are you attacking the man and not his argument?
What part of his argument relies on his personal use of a browser? He is discussing the underlying conceptual issues, not the aesthetic design of modern web pages, for Eris' sake.

Re:OK, dumb question after reading the article

[betterunixthanunix]

You may wish to modify extend the web app in some way that is suitable for you. For example, I know people who want GMail to support PGP; there is a Firefox plugin that modifies the page layout and Javascript so that messages can be signed, encrypted, decrypted and verified. This is the same argument that is made for free software on your desktop.

Re:I thought I did.

[betterunixthanunix]

"F/OSS only appeals to people who LIKE to trudge through others code to see how it works or make it "better". To me, software is an end to a means and I don't really give a rat's ass how it works as long as it's not doing shit behind may back that I don't want; which I can find out by other means than looking at source code."

Free-libre software is about more than just looking through source code. The availability of source code is a means to an end; there are non-free licenses that provide access to source code, and even the right to modify that source code. Free-libre licensing grants you freedoms that you really do not have with proprietary systems, including those that make code available to you:

• The freedom to install the software on as many systems, and for as many users, as you wish. For a web apps, some vendors limit how many simultaneous users (or how many users in total) may use the system; a free-libre system cannot impose such a limit.
• The freedom to use the software perpetually.
• The freedom to use the software for whatever purpose you see fit (compare this with the AAC codec license, which forbids "client software" for being used for "professional" purposes).
• The freedom to use modifications to the software that other people have developed.
• The freedom to give the software to someone else.
• The freedom to discuss the software with someone else (there are proprietary systems that forbid or limit this as "trade secrets").

Maybe these are not things that really matter to you. I have encountered restrictions on every one of the above items from different software packages, and it has caused me and the other users/administrators of the software serious headaches. In cases where free-libre software was introduced, people just got their work done -- no worries about breaking the law, no worries about the software suddenly becoming inoperable, no restrictions on who we may discuss the software with.

Re:I thought I did.

[cozziewozzie]

I share the same philosophy about computers. I don't want to waste hours of my life on coding software. I'd rather just work 1 hour of overtime, and then go out and buy the program I need.

You don't get the whole point of Free Software in the first place.

But the beauty of it is that even you can profit from its fruits. Every time you surf on the internet, or listen to music or watch a movie. Most of those are running on or were created with Free Software.

Re:OK, dumb question after reading the article

[mr_mischief]

You are using software which uses Berkeley sockets, from the BSD project, to communicate with others over the Internet. Either the code is from BSD or it has been written to be compatible with BSD sockets. Very little software in the world speaks TCP/IP that doesn't use Berkeley sockets to do so.

If you are using a closed-source browser other than Opera, you're using one based on the open-source Mosaic or Mozilla browsers, or on the open-source KHTML or WebKit (which itself is based on KHTML). The very first web browser and the very first graphical web browser were both open source. The very first browser was called WorldWideWeb (and later Nexus to avoid confusion with "The Web" as a whole), and Tim Berners-Lee released it into the public domain in 1993. All web browsers are knockoffs of an open source project, some more directly than others.

You are using a site which is written in a language which has always been open with language tools that have always been open (that language is Perl, by the way, and any commercial Perl distribution you've seen is a copy of the open one).

The code for the Slashdot site itself is open. Although some changes may be different between the version control system and the exact code this site runs at any given moment, an open-source version of the codebase exists over at Slashcode.com [slashcode.com] for your enjoyment or use.

The site is served by use of an open-source web server called Apache. Perhaps you've heard of it. The original web server was also open-source software, and was called CERN HTTPd. CERN HTTPd was adopted by the W3C as W3C HTTPd and has sicne been supplanted by the open-source web server Jigsaw. All web servers are clones of an open-source project.

Any version of Emacs you might use, including any of the commercial Emacs clones that are proprietary and closed-source, are based on the open-source Emacs written by none other than RMS.

Most of the first games for computers had freely available source, and some of them are still available. That's a whole market in which the closed-source people were not the first movers.

use a proxy on your home server

[ecloud]

A web proxy can rewrite content arbitrarily, including this type of mod. Just run your own proxy on your own server. Maybe even a home server if your ISP doesn't block that: this example is a very good reason to make a political push for the expanded definition of "network neutrality", that is, all ports are open, nothing is blocked, you have the freedom to publish from home. (You can always secure your own proxy if you don't want other people to use it.)

Failing that, there is shared hosting where you could run your own personal proxy that augments the capabilities of the browser itself.

Another feature I've been wanting to write a proxy for (and haven't gotten around to!) is to store my web history permanently and make it searchable, so I can find forgotten web sites again. It should be able to store notes I write about sites, so I can search those too.

Failing that, there is greasemonkey.

Re:What about the server side?

[Jamie's Nightmare]

I wonder if RMS visits any websites at all besides fsf.org

I'm glad you asked. Let's get a direct quote [lwn.net] from the man himself:

"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer."

At the risk of obvious ridicule he doesn't give the reasons behind this choice, but that's not really important here. Stallman is truly out of touch with the real needs of people who actually use computers on a daily basis. He is out of touch by his own choice. What really burns my taters is that so few properly chastise Stallman for this foolishness. Even worse, some actually defend it.

Re:I thought I did.

[Austerity Empowers]

The problem is that proprietary software is usually not supply and demand. There are very few competitors and the products are never exactly the same. Further the man hours required to develop and support the products create a high barrier for new products, essentially restricting the market further.

Putting your vendor in a position where they have to compete against a $100/hr consultant is supply and demand. There is an essentially fungible commodity whose price is dictated by a competitive system. You can only beat this by doing the work yourself, assuming you have the necessary skill and other uses of your time have less value.

There's nothing wrong with being charged based on the market. Being charged based on "what I think you can afford to pay" is the problem.

Re:I thought I did.

[noidentity]

I was using wget and wanted to have it download just the first N bytes of a file, so I could preview a bunch from a directory, then finish downloading only those that I liked. It didn't have this feature, so I downloaded the source code and added it in about 30 minutes (and I'm not at all familiar with Unix build scripts, nor do I regularly do this). It was very useful to have the source code.

Re:How does Stallman use the web?

[shutdown -p now]

How does Stallman use the web?

Here's how [lwn.net].

Re:Stallman has to go

[JonJ]

He probably does not care so much for the open source movement, as he works for the Free Software Foundation. That's not the same thing.

Re:OK, dumb question after reading the article

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No, the Mysql version Google uses is free. They release patches periodically and are generally Mysql and Innodb's best friend ( along with percona [mysqlperformanceblog.com]) Innodb recently released a new official version of their engine containing the google code.

You can find Google's latest Patch here [google.com]

Re:OK, dumb question after reading the article

[paazin]

He's approaching it from a physiological standpoint; it's much akin to saying the natural element of man isn't the sea as he has a limited innate ability to swim and no ability to process air underwater - though that can be augmented using technology (eg rebreather, scuba, fins) it isn't an innate ability and not part of his 'natural' state. The same with a purely vegan diet, as the human physiology is designed to digest both plant and animal matter.