Re: Builder crowdsourcing banner on PGO

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 8:12 PM, Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com> wrote:

Hmm I am not so sure: The chip in your own card will be programmed with non-free software technically the transaction can't work unless the ATM is reading that. For the ATM to read your chip you are required you to physically connect your card's chip to the ATM's reader thus making an electronic circuit between your nonfree chip software and their non-free ATM software

If the nature of a philosophical question is found to depend on the formation or absence of an electronic circuit, is it still a philosophical question?

(Seriously -- the answer is relevant.)

This does not seem like proportionate response taking into account that the Builder campaign has time considerations and the developer needs to, like eat and stuff to keep on living (lest we forget that). How about we all agree to let Builder off the hook and have a policy discussion about linking to sites that use non-free software, for in future?   

There is a wide gulf between the installation of nonfree software on a computer and the interpretation and compilation of nonfree _javascript_ by a web browser. On a technical level, I reject that that constitutes "installation" of software, but that's just semantics, so let's move on. On a philosophical level, the web site is a service, and we already agree that it's not our problem if the service provider runs nonfree software: but why is the question of whether it's the user's computer or the service provider's computer that executes nonfree code very interesting? This is a technical, implementation detail that's largely immaterial to the user experience. (Traditional free software respects the user and provides a significantly different user experience than proprietary software.) On a practical level, a campaign against obfuscated JS is completely doomed and can only hurt our efforts to attract users to free software. (How many people do you think would be using <your distro here> if it shipped IceCat instead of Firefox?) I suspect that the community of free software hackers eager to take on the entire Internet is dramatically smaller than those trying to maintain the free desktop.

Richard's analysis in this thread and the essays on his web site are good, insightful reading, and I appreciate his guidance and continued participation in foundation-list threads, but his campaign against browser JS seems much more radical to me than the rest of our community's already-radical beliefs*. So let's find out what others think before we jump the gun and assume we have a problem here: does anyone else here use IceCat or LibreJS and believe that donating to the Builder campaign via Indiegogo is unethical due to its use of obfuscated Javascipt? In the absence of further complaints, let's get that banner posted, please.

Michael

P.S. I'm CCing Christian since I'm frankly unsure if he's aware of this discussion.

* To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email....