Re: [Repo-criteria-discuss] Ethical hosting means Free Software hosting

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2016 at 13:23:41 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
>> But they are different issues from software freedom, and I think that's
>> where the criteria confusion comes in; rms explains them here:
>> 
>>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
>
> I don't understand why you say these are "different issues from
> software freedom" and then link to an article by RMS which explains
> how proprietary websites make people unfree.

See the section "Untangling the SaaSS Issue from the Proprietary
Software Issue".

You can't exercise the four freedoms on something you don't run
yourself.

> Indeed, when websites are built, the software engineers treat the
> server code and the JS as parts of a whole.  In some case the JS is
> even generated ad-hoc by the server.

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing.

When I think of a website, I think of HTML documents.  It might be
augmented with JavaScript for some interactive features.  Having a site
written in PHP with a little bit of JS is very different than SaaSS.

It doesn't matter if you have the source code to someone's blog, or your
local restaurant's webpage, or even a site like Amazon.  It's a bonus,
but users aren't losing anything.

Users _do_ lose out when they use SaaSS _in place of_ software.  This
has been a problem for a long while, one of the easiest examples being
web MUAs (like all popular e-mail hosts).

> Even if you could find some website where the JS is "Free" by this
> definition, but the server side is not, the user still does not have
> much practical ability to run modified JS.

http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts.html

>> The server code isn't robbing them of their four freedoms because they
>> never had the ability to exercise them in the first place: it's not
>> running on their computer.
>
> You write that this "isn't robbing them of their four freedoms" but
> then you have to ackwledge that the user "never had" freedom "in the
> first place".  Your comparator is deliberately crippled.

The four freedoms apply to computing that you do yourself.  If you don't
have the program, you can't possibly do that computing yourself to begin
with.

You're being robbed of other freedoms, but not the four freedoms.

>> Nearly every website you visit does not have its source code available,
>> and they distribute HTML documents.  Those documents are often generated
>> by data on the server, or some sort of logic: e.g. a forum.  We don't
>> think of those as robbing our freedoms, because they're aren't.
>
> The Debian project takes a different view.  We think that our code
> hosting systems, bug trackers, discussion software, and so on, need to
> be Free.

I think they should be too; I'm not in disagreement there.  But users
wouldn't traditionally host these types of things: even if they could
host their own bug tracker, they can't modify the one that they're
using; it doesn't help them communicate with the rest of the community
when the instance they're running is wholly segregated from it.

(Granted, in this case, federated services are the
answer.  Centralization is another issue.)

> The existing criteria do not actually require that a site works
> without JavaScript, of course.  It's just that a proprietary website
> whose JavaScript is Free is a theoretical and impractical beast which
> no-one would bother to create.

JavaScript programs are distinct software.  They might be tightly
coupled with the site they're running on, but they are programs
downloaded and run on your computer.  They therefore _must_ be free,
full stop.

>> That would mean that we're recommending sites that might be serving
>> proprietary JavaScript.
>
> No, because we wouldn't be recommending any proprietary sites _at
> all_, because A0 (site is Free) would be required for recommendation.

A0 doesn't mean that the server software is available, it just means
that it works without JavaScript.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
https://mikegerwitz.com
FSF Member #5804 | GPG Key ID: 0x8EE30EAB

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