[buug] $*#! JavaScript and the new playing field for Free Software

[Nick Jennings]

Hi Ian, thanks for your response.

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Ian Zimmerman <itz at buug.org> wrote:
>
> Nick> There will never be a replacement for keeping the power of your OS
> Nick> (I hate the concept of the chrome-book), but in many ways the
> Nick> advent of HTML5, the movement to embrace JavaScript rather than
> Nick> put up with it, and web-apps in general, do help to level the
> Nick> playing feild for free operating systems.
>
> I cannot see this at all.  For me, the trends toward web apps is
> essentially an end run around free software, as RMS has predicted.  And
> the conspiracy theorist in me is convinced this is quite intentional,
> i.e. someone somewhere (probably in the US Northwest) in a smoke filled
> room came up with the idea and saw where it would go.

I would have completely agreed with you a year ago. My first reaction
was to stay as far away as possible.


> Of course it is not about JavaScript the language which is no uglier
> than, say, Perl.  It is about depending on untrusted, unfixable (unless
> you control the website) and mostly un-inspectable (with minimization
> etc.) code.

Untrusted only in as far as running something which you cannot easily
vet the source of. Which is not the case of open-source webapps, with
publically available github repositories. What's the difference
between running an open-source webapp or checking out and compiling an
open-source native application? Assuming you can address the vendor
lock-in (keeping your data on their servers, or the app being
dependant on some critical server-side functionality), the only
difference is the open-source web-app can reach a broader audience.

You bring up a crucial point though. The term 'web-app' has generally
been used to encompass a large spectrum of functionality, generally
with the application tied to a back-end server and system. However
this is what projects like unhosted.org are trying to free users from.
To try to influence the 'web-app' movement for the better and liberate
peoples data and applications from vendor tie-in.

The paradigm is simple. Keep all web-app logic on the client-size (js,
css, html), decouple the vendor lock-in by providing a generic library
to facility remote-storage (remoteStorage.js) which could just as
easily be running on localhost, or on your own server somewhere "in
the cloud". The app could be distributed straight from the github
repository, or via various open-app channels of your choosing.

I also fear the Brave New Web, and consider this an important battle
to fight for proponents of Free Software. I hope this at least prompts
you to have another look and possibly re-evaluate the situation as you
see it, I think there are many ways to look at this problem.

--
Nick Jennings
www.silverbucket.net