[Dev] [PATCH] Iceweasl 77.0.1 update

[bill-auger]

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 18:05:26 +0000 grizzlyuser wrote:
> In my understanding, the following two sentences of the FSDG
> pretty much cover the JS issue:
> 
> > A free system distribution must not steer users towards
> > obtaining any nonfree information for practical use, or
> > encourage them to do so.  
> 
> > Programs in the system should not suggest installing nonfree
> > plugins, documentation, and so on.  

i think "obtaining" and "installing" are the key words there -
you really need to squint your eyes just so, in order to place
those terms regarding javascript on a web  page - it is never
installed, and you can not even access the copy you have of it,
other than very crudely, within the sandbox - if you simply
downloaded it, and replaced it with a customized version, it
most likely would not function - its really a very different
beast than "real software", that which the FSDG was written to
address - in order for any software to be "real software" by my
definition, i need to be able to practically modify it, then
practically use my modified version in the original context for
the same original purpose - therefore, the current web does not
permit "real software" and precludes the four freedoms, usually
all four if you take into account that most every website has
strict TOS; because any TOS precludes freedom #0

it could be interpreted that way; but i do not believe that
javascript was ever in mind at the time of its writing, and i
have never seen anyone put that interpretation into practice -
also, i think the intention of the recommendation is most
important - the intention in this case is not to obtain
javascript, it is to obtain the phone app - thats the main
reason i see that as the over-riding concern

that was not to argue against the interpretation - we (the
parabola devs) generally think the FSDG is long overdue for an
update, to be more specific about the grey areas that it had not
the context or foresight to prescribe for explicitly


On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 18:05:26 +0000 grizzlyuser wrote:
> I guess even the markup, stylesheets, SVG (given the feature
> set) can count as “Information for practical use” in terms of
> FSDG.

again at the time the FSDG was written, no web pages were for
practical use really - JS and CSS existed for not much more than
to make web pages prettier - i do not consider reading a pretty
web page to be any kind of "use", which would be different from
reading a magazine

perhaps today its various uses would qualify as more practical;
but that was almost surely not the original intention of those
words - again because the software is not really "obtained" -
imagine that instead of client-side javascript, the very same
website had all of the same functionality, but everything was
running on the server and accessed only through a VNC client -
the "practical use" would be exactly the same, and so would the
users ability to modify its behavior; because the software is
not ever "obtained for practical use"

any software licenses for website javascripts are pretty much
useless, unless the entire web service code is freely licensed
and can be self-hosted

IMHO all javascript which can not be self-hosted is inherently
non-free; because it is impossible to exercise all four freedoms
when relying on someone else computer to feed code into your
blindly, even if some license grants the four freedoms
theoretically - so AFAIC, we should not direct users to any
third-party website for any reason, and we generally do not