3 ms·
Since when did 'the web' involve giving away all the source code and not charging people for things? Did Google open source their search engine and let anybody
by anon1385 13y ago
Since when did 'the web' involve giving away all the source code and not charging people for things? Did Google open source their search engine and let anybody advertise on their site for free while I wasn't looking?
I really don't understand this meme about the web being 'open'. Much of the native desktop software I use is open source. Practically none of the web services I use are open source. There is not much chance of a 'GNU project' for the web (i.e. reimplementing an open google and twitter and facebook and so on). Open source web services of significance are few and far between and when it comes to controlling our data usually the best we get is a proprietary API that may or may not get shut down or changed tomorrow.
The web gave us RSS which was good[1] but since then it has been pretty much a non stop stream of proprietary APIs and platform lock-in. Even things built on RSS tend to be proprietary APIs rather than open standards: take Google Reader for example. Before it shut down it should have been trivial to pull your subscriptions out of it and point your clients at a new replacement rss-syncing server (like you can do with an email client). But it wasn't because there was no damn standard for that, just proprietary APIs as various people wanted to lock you into their cloud service. The standards that have emerged have been, of course, ones that generally involve lock-in to proprietary platforms, like OAuth.
[1] interestingly many of the new generation of web developers seem to dislike RSS.
- r0h1n 13y agoSince the headline was "reinventing the web" (a pretty ambitious, even bombastic goal), it would be fair to expect the solution to be open-source and/or free. Of course had the headline been "improving the web" or "making a faster web" then our expectations might have been different.
- iand 13y agoThe web is characterised by all code being visible by default, e.g. "View Source" in every browser. It's agnostic on whether you can charge for that source code, but in practical terms it's pretty tough to publish openly readable source and expect people to pay for it.
- anon1385 13y ago'View Source' is not freedom: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html Many sites still use JavaScript that way, but some use it for major programs that do large jobs. For instance, Google Docs downloads into your machine a JavaScript program which measures half a megabyte, in a compacted form that we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long. The source code of a program is the preferred form for modifying it; the compacted code is not source code, and the real source code of this program is not available to the user.
- iand 13y agoNot a very convincing argument. See for example, http://jsbeautifier.org/ http://jsbeautifier.org/
- spot 13y agoweb client technologies are open. this is a client technology.
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoThings like Flash, Silverlight, PDF readers and other native plug-in components generally aren't open.