I get the argument (also I think it nonsense) but what will rewriting a sites Javascript do about the server side? That would still be non-free. Or is the argument here that the backend and the API is not important because it's only generating HTML/Json/whatever and that's only "data" so you don't care about it. If so, I would turn that argument around and argue that the non-free Javascript is only an extension of the server side and is only generating data - the DOM.
The backend is someone else's. It's out of scope, because it's effectively a service.
The frontend code executes in your browser, on your machine. It's in scope of GNU/FSF interest, because the end-users of that code would benefit from the four freedoms. A lot of people who strongly believe in the value of the Four Freedoms try to minimize the amount of non-free code they run, hence the desire for free frontend replacements.
The way I see it, this concern meshes nicely with a more general desire to be able to substitute your own frontend for the one that's served to you. If you imagine a world where people develop and exchange alternative frontends, the users would benefit from these frontends being "free as in freedom".
Of course we're pretty far from that world - but it's not impossible; the term of art is "adversarial interoperability" and I'm a great fan of it.
Stallman has been proved correct so often especially after people mock him, that I now listen to what he says carefully. This might seem silly now, but in 10 years it might be what everyone is asking for.
> This might seem silly now, but in 10 years it might be what everyone is asking for.
You may be on to something. Initially I thought the concept was silly, but then I started thinking about Wasm binaries and it starts to become less silly.
You have not actually suggested any concrete statements. I still have no idea what he has said about Prism, the best I got is that he linked to an article from his website.
The Right to Read is certainly interesting, maybe not the best written short story, and it is still quite far from having come true. But it is a nice bucket list of things to be aware of while shaping the future, so points for that one.
In the past, I had a userscript that would just clean up the DOM document on the page (along the lines of document.body.textContent = '') and would just fetch/parse/query the website content anew via XHR and render the content as I liked.
It worked pretty well. And if you keep using some common helper functions, it would not even be that much code. A few tens of lines, or something like that.
You're also within the browser and the origin, with all the cookies and stuff handled for you by the browser, and a ton of platform API at hand, so it's fairly easy to even make your own forms and submit data to the server.
It's also a way to not be accused of creating a derived work from some proprietary CSS/JS that might have been on the website, if you ever publish the userscript.
I have a 3 year old. Daycares have been closed (except for parents working in critical infrastructure) for a while now (two months? I have honestly lost track).
Today we got an email from our daycare that we can send him back in at the 1th of March. We were politely asked to not send him if we don't need to and we will do exactly that. But I am nearly certain we will be the one of very few parents that actually do that.
I don't want to risk getting him or us sick and I am nearly certain that we will lock down again in a few weeks. What is the point of this "opening up"? I can already see the cases rising...the R value is now again over 1.
Oh well...I really no longer care. My immediate circle of friend and parents are all very careful. My wife and I have solid work from home jobs and our son seems happy enough staying at home as well. I will just wait it out and ignore the general media like I have been doing...the rest of the world can honestly do whatever the fuck they want.
I mean...yes, it could happen like it is outlined in the article. But the easy (and imho proper way to do it completely avoids it: Don't rely on the User-Agent (like: at all) and do proper feature detection client side where you probably need it anyway. This way you also don't have the problem of having to maintain the list of browsers to features.
browser sniffing is bad, but I have seen the browser string used as a means of creating device id's to detect when a user is signing in from a new or different device or was compromised
5€ per day is 150€ a month. I think that this is reasonable but somewhat on the low side.
My family of 3 spends around 100 to 130 Euros per week on groceries. We don't really are trying to save on groceries and usually buy what we want. We eat not much meat and usually cook fresh instead of using convenience food. We try to buy medium to high quality, local and seasonal food.
So it's a tad more than 150€ per person but not that much.
I get the argument (also I think it nonsense) but what will rewriting a sites Javascript do about the server side? That would still be non-free. Or is the argument here that the backend and the API is not important because it's only generating HTML/Json/whatever and that's only "data" so you don't care about it. If so, I would turn that argument around and argue that the non-free Javascript is only an extension of the server side and is only generating data - the DOM.