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The 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

by iand 13y ago

The 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 ago
  Not a very convincing argument. See for example, http://jsbeautifier.org/ http://jsbeautifier.org/