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> because you can't use your freedoms in practice anyway Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided

by jraph 4y ago

> because you can't use your freedoms in practice anyway Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided one. A convenient extension to do this might not exist yet, but you could block the website's provided JavaScript with uBlock Origin / uMatrix and use your fork with ViolentMonkey or another *Monkey extension. And distribute your fork on some user scripts repository (for instance). Free software is not (only) about avoiding spying. It's about running the code you want to run for any endeavor you can have, and be able to study and distribute your modifications. I totally agree with your last paragraph and I agree something should be done to deal with how (web) software is distributed and run.

robalni 4y ago
> Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided one. Ok, that's possible to do but it's not a solution to the problem because: - You would not have much use of it because javascript is often very dependent on the web page and the server so if any of those changes, your script breaks. There is no expectation that people do this so the website owners have no reason to keep a stable API. - Only the people who use that extension or browser benefit from having that freedom. Compare this to traditional software where forks can easily be created and maintained and get more popular than the original fork. Now people who don't even know about the forks will benefit from it because they will likely use the fork that gets popular which can be the better one. An example of this is software distributions (like Debian and so on) that may modify upstream software in a way that benefits all users, even the ones who are not aware. That would be extremely difficult to do with all websites on the web without things constantly breaking.
- jraph 4y ago
  I agree that its not practical nor satisfactory indeed.

by jraph 4y ago

robalni 4y ago

> Yes, you could. You can adapt the code and use an extension to use your "fork" instead of the provided one. Ok, that's possible to do but it's not a solution to the problem because: - You would not have much use of it because javascript is often very dependent on the web page and the server so if any of those changes, your script breaks. There is no expectation that people do this so the website owners have no reason to keep a stable API. - Only the people who use that extension or browser benefit from having that freedom. Compare this to traditional software where forks can easily be created and maintained and get more popular than the original fork. Now people who don't even know about the forks will benefit from it because they will likely use the fork that gets popular which can be the better one. An example of this is software distributions (like Debian and so on) that may modify upstream software in a way that benefits all users, even the ones who are not aware. That would be extremely difficult to do with all websites on the web without things constantly breaking.

jraph 4y ago
I agree that its not practical nor satisfactory indeed.