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5 comments so far and 4 have either missed the point or are distracting the discussion into lessons on semantics. I'll definitely fail to put it as well as the

by stephth 15y ago

5 comments so far and 4 have either missed the point or are distracting the discussion into lessons on semantics. I'll definitely fail to put it as well as the author did, but I believe the point wasn't "surprise, copyright doesn't exist", the point was client-side js by nature shares code, and sharing code is good, so this community is in a great position to fully embrace open source, and it should.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
feralchimp 15y ago
Perhaps those commenters would disagree with your interpretation of 'the' point of her post. She makes a number of them. This passage is what I focused on: "You can protest, argue, call people thieves, stake the moral high ground, and point fingers all you want. There is no obfuscation, everything you have done is right out in the open for everyone to see. More importantly, everything you do is in the ecosystem for people to learn from. I think it's a great proof of concept as I've never heard anyone get angry at someone else for stealing something they have written for the DOM. People don't run around copy -> pasting things they find elsewhere. For many reasons, mainly, your style comes through in what you write. Your code is your signature, and someone else's never can express your unique type of art. When it does happen (which it does), it is a matter of ethics, not law or government. Clientside JavaScript is policed by the JavaScript community, and if you're a thief that copies and pastes, people know." That's quite a bit stronger than saying "client side code can be seen by everyone." She's saying client side code can be seen by everyone, AND in those cases where its copied no one should appeal to the law to protect their IP. Well, F that noise. "People knowing" whether someone copied my code doesn't pay my hypothetical bills / employees / etc. And if someone copies my code and uses it to take my customers, well Sucks To Be Me, but if I have sufficient resources to consider a decision between "being cool about it" and saving my business by appealing to the law, guess what I'm going to do? And if Sara thinks that's a moral failing on my part, well, she can explain to my employees why their livelihood is less important than being a good Stallman-ist.
blurbytree 15y ago
All installable/downloadable software also shares code. It just happens to be machine code, which adds a little hurdle, just like a good javascript minifier does.
mmahemoff 15y ago
It's funny that one can make the opposite point. As I wrote a couple of years ago [1], we're getting to a point where many sites actually have obfuscated source, as there's much more attention paid to perfromance optimisations. View Source is becoming a thing of the past, at least as far as high-scale production sites go. While you can still inspect the DOM and so on, but it's not as accessible if the source isn't there. So in fact, open source code on GitHub and so on is the best hope for learning and reusing, but that puts JavaScript in the same basket as every other language. 1. http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-end-of-days-for-view-source http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-end-of-days-for-view-source
- bad_user 15y ago
  One thing I do in my daily job for the current project is to automate form submissions on various websites. I deal with obfuscated Javascript all the time. It's really not a problem. It's also quite amusing when I see "protections" in place, like my local Yellow Pages that encrypts phone numbers that get decrypted when shown by a local Javascript routine, done of course to prevent crawling. Obfuscated code is not readable. However a smarter view-source can take care of that - imagine a view-source that worked like an IDE. It could beautify the source-code (I'm sure you can already find plugins for this) and once you figure out what a variable / method does, you can then automatically refactor the code, renaming that variable/method. It takes a bit of engineering, but obfuscated Javascript is still high-level enough to be useful.
  - packet 15y ago
    This makes it no different from most programming languages. De-obfuscated code still takes a ton of work when you've lost all variable names, comments, and formatting.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      Except most client-side applications are distributed in binary form. Grokking obfuscated assembly language is an order of magnitude harder than doing the same thing with Javascript.

by stephth 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

feralchimp 15y ago

Perhaps those commenters would disagree with your interpretation of 'the' point of her post. She makes a number of them. This passage is what I focused on: "You can protest, argue, call people thieves, stake the moral high ground, and point fingers all you want. There is no obfuscation, everything you have done is right out in the open for everyone to see. More importantly, everything you do is in the ecosystem for people to learn from. I think it's a great proof of concept as I've never heard anyone get angry at someone else for stealing something they have written for the DOM. People don't run around copy -> pasting things they find elsewhere. For many reasons, mainly, your style comes through in what you write. Your code is your signature, and someone else's never can express your unique type of art. When it does happen (which it does), it is a matter of ethics, not law or government. Clientside JavaScript is policed by the JavaScript community, and if you're a thief that copies and pastes, people know." That's quite a bit stronger than saying "client side code can be seen by everyone." She's saying client side code can be seen by everyone, AND in those cases where its copied no one should appeal to the law to protect their IP. Well, F that noise. "People knowing" whether someone copied my code doesn't pay my hypothetical bills / employees / etc. And if someone copies my code and uses it to take my customers, well Sucks To Be Me, but if I have sufficient resources to consider a decision between "being cool about it" and saving my business by appealing to the law, guess what I'm going to do? And if Sara thinks that's a moral failing on my part, well, she can explain to my employees why their livelihood is less important than being a good Stallman-ist.

blurbytree 15y ago

All installable/downloadable software also shares code. It just happens to be machine code, which adds a little hurdle, just like a good javascript minifier does.

mmahemoff 15y ago

It's funny that one can make the opposite point. As I wrote a couple of years ago [1], we're getting to a point where many sites actually have obfuscated source, as there's much more attention paid to perfromance optimisations. View Source is becoming a thing of the past, at least as far as high-scale production sites go. While you can still inspect the DOM and so on, but it's not as accessible if the source isn't there. So in fact, open source code on GitHub and so on is the best hope for learning and reusing, but that puts JavaScript in the same basket as every other language. 1. http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-end-of-days-for-view-source http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-end-of-days-for-view-source

bad_user 15y ago
One thing I do in my daily job for the current project is to automate form submissions on various websites. I deal with obfuscated Javascript all the time. It's really not a problem. It's also quite amusing when I see "protections" in place, like my local Yellow Pages that encrypts phone numbers that get decrypted when shown by a local Javascript routine, done of course to prevent crawling. Obfuscated code is not readable. However a smarter view-source can take care of that - imagine a view-source that worked like an IDE. It could beautify the source-code (I'm sure you can already find plugins for this) and once you figure out what a variable / method does, you can then automatically refactor the code, renaming that variable/method. It takes a bit of engineering, but obfuscated Javascript is still high-level enough to be useful.
- packet 15y ago
  This makes it no different from most programming languages. De-obfuscated code still takes a ton of work when you've lost all variable names, comments, and formatting.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Except most client-side applications are distributed in binary form. Grokking obfuscated assembly language is an order of magnitude harder than doing the same thing with Javascript.