Re: [fsf-community-team] Enhancements and fixes for js-encumbered websites

[Yuchen Pei]

W. Kosior via fsf-community-team <fsf-community-team@gnu.org> 
writes:

> Hello,
>
> I'd like to invite you to take a look at and possibly contribute 
> to our
> project aiming to deliver user-controlled Internet. We're 
> developing a
> platform to allow, among others, _replacing_ web pages' scripts 
> with
> user-provided ones. Besides making websites once again usable 
> with
> libre software, we also plan to facilitate making, running and 
> sharing
> site enhancements (features, styling, alternative interfaces,
> translations, accessibility fixes).
>
> Documentation* (also contains non-technical concept 
> explanation):
>   https://koszko.org/browser-extension-doc.html

Nice documentation - lots of food for thought, thanks! (Also the 
project looks like a great initialtive)

One minor question about the documentation:

> LibreJS' strategy of judging scripts based on a license notice 
> fails for example when someone takes an X11-licensed js library, 
> modifies it and serves a minified version of the modified lib on 
> their site. LibreJS will allow this script to execute, even 
> though the modifications are obviously nonfree.

Why would the modifications be nonfree in this case? Minification 
is a derivative like compilation, and if the source is licensed 
under X11, and if the modified version is also under a free 
license, then there's no problem LibreJS allows it to execute.

Another thought I have about the project after reading the 
documentation (haven't studied all the technical details yet), is 
that while the goal is software freedom, it tries to address many 
problems, including malicious js code and crypto mining and 
verification of source-minification correspondence. But IMO the 
key is to fix the "tivoization" of the web by easing the action of 
replacing js scripts of each site with user-supplied 
freely-licensed ones. I assume it is doable with LibreJS + 
GreaseMonkey (haven't tried it myself), but perhaps a first step 
could be just to combine the functionalities of these two to make 
it dead easy to substitute scripts before they are run, and the 
second step could be to create the platform of a free js repo for 
all the webistes?

Best,
Yuchen

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