Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    The point I was trying to make was  that HTML 5 (or more formally some 
    of the API's for javascript for accessing local storage), among other 
    things, enables offline use of web  applications.

This sounds both interesting and dangerous.  Maybe it would let you
explicitly install a free program written in Javascript, and it could
do the same jobs a C program could do.  That seems fine, just like
installing a C program to do it.  On the other hand, it might also
enable web pages to attack you in new ways.

Javascript programs are not necessarily bad, but if browsers
temporarily install them silently without checking whether they are
free, that systematically leads users to run nonfree software without
knowing it.

I would like to find out more about this change, so I will write to
you separately.

    2) but also to improve compression of the loading of such programs 
    initially. People like Google work *hard* on latency and understand 
    every byte counts (among many other things: go look at the google talks 
    by their engineers on the topic).

This is a kind of compilation, and in principle it's no more of an
obstacle to free software than other kinds of compilation.  You just
need to make the source code available in another file.

We are working on the issue of nonfree Javascript code -- see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.  There are people
working on extensions to NoScript to detect nontrivial nonfree
Javascript programs in pages, but progress seems to be slow.  If you
know people who would like to help with this, please put them in touch
with me.