Anybody who dares call herself or himself a hacker should respect RMS. The name calling on this page is disgusting.
You don't know the guy, you don't have any thing on him. He doesn't force anybody to use his licenses. He is just warning users of a proprietary software trap, that's all. If you happen to serve this kind of website it's stupid to just get into the name calling and instead perhaps state clearly your JavaScript isn't free software. Add a license, you need it anyway to cover yourself.
Exactly, I am sure a large number of the YC guys use free software on their servers and workstations, yet how many have given monetary support to the FSF in the form of donations or anything ? I won't be surprised to know the answer will be too few.
Anyway, just give the man some respect, he is somewhat an extremist, but if it weren't for this guy you wouldn't be starting all these startups on shoestring budgets and I know that everyone in their heart of hearts knows that the world is a better place because of RMS.
It's incoherent rambling. Extremism. There is no trap. No end users care.
What average user of a webapp even understands what a software license is? Why would they care either way if they can see comments in the javascript or not??
Obviously you need to make clear if your javascript is open source or not, and both should be respected decisions.
I think the majority just care if something solves their problem, rather than if its open source or not.
Linux doesn't beat windows because it's open source, it beats it because it works far better.
One of the reasons it works better just happens to be because it's open source, which enables far more people to contribute than otherwise etc etc.
Are people seriously going to stop using webapps that don't provide their source code unobfuscated? Of course not.
It's incoherent rambling. Extremism.
You do know who RMS is, yes?
His overriding concern as an ongoing basis is that people should have the freedom to tinker with software - to be able to read, improve, share the programs we are running.
He's not arguing that you're falling into a personal, small scale 'trap' like you will get your finger stuck or something, but that whole groups of people who care may not have noticed this set of events sneaking past them.
Or that this is yet another area where we should care, but don't, and that should change so that if you do care, you can do something about it.
No end users care.
That maybe true, but it shouldn't be true.
I think the majority just care if something solves their problem, rather than if its open source or not.
Exactly the problem - this week I saw an end user called us up asking us to help get some information out of a program they run. Luckily, it runs on a popular database backend. Unluckily, it's proprietary closed source software and there is no documentation of what the database tables and fields mean or how they are used.
They bought it because it "solved their problem". Now that lead to other problems. Problems which are both completely predictable (information stuck in artificially limited proprietary system) and avoidable (use artificial-limitation-free documented open system).
And on a more general level, promote the use of such across the entire computing industry so such programs become available.
Ah, the open source advocate! The type who doesn't really care about freedom, who only cares about what is pragmatic in the short-term.
RMS isn't being extremist in this case at all. Your only two options are to fully enable or disable JavaScript. That's not much of a choice because if you enable JavaScript you let in some company's proprietary code to be run on your machine. Imagine you're coding a Free Software Javascript library and the proprietary competitor's product is run on your machine. They can prove that you've run their code, and maybe you looked at it and now you're setup for copyright infringement.
If you fully disable Javascript with NoScript, then you won't be able to run "safe" Javascript.
Two choices that are both extreme. The real extremism is in the web browser that doesn't allow you to create a blacklist/whitelist or to use replacement JavaScript.
>> "Imagine you're coding a Free Software Javascript library and the proprietary competitor's product is run on your machine. They can prove that you've run their code, and maybe you looked at it and now you're setup for copyright infringement."
Sure, most people using GMail or Google docs are programming open source javascript libraries on the side..... Very common I'm sure :/
If you're programming an open source js library and you're worried about a webapp suing you, don't use it?
You don't know the guy, you don't have any thing on him. He doesn't force anybody to use his licenses. He is just warning users of a proprietary software trap, that's all. If you happen to serve this kind of website it's stupid to just get into the name calling and instead perhaps state clearly your JavaScript isn't free software. Add a license, you need it anyway to cover yourself.