Hi,
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 8:12 PM, Magdalen Berns <m.be...@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....
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