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by gech 3111 days ago
This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?
5 comments

You may be interested in this thread going on right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958827

Minified javascript isn't really open source either.
Non-minified JavaScript with good comments documenting its behavior isn’t (necessarily) open source either.

That you can read the code (or that it doesn’t claim a license) doesn’t make code open source.

Sure, but that definition of opensource wasn't implied with "closed source due to wasm".
No, but there are tons of prettifiers that can get minified/obfuscated JS back into a state that it can be read and reasoned about fairly easily. It's not like minifiying/obfuscating JS compiles it into byte code. It's still plain text.
As we can use a decompiler with other languages.
Barely! It's not far from bytecode in some cases, especially with the advent of asm.js.
Do you or anyone else have any recommendations for a good tool to recover minified java script?
http://jsnice.org works well, though misses many oportunities of restoring variable names based on property names which cannot be minified.
Not necessarily, WebAssembly will support view source features: http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#will-webassembly-support-vi...
Free software has never been about the technical possibility of something, but a moral and cultural value. I.E. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. So favor sites which don't obfuscate or make their (WASM) source code available as free software.
Shouldn't it be possible to decompile from wasm to the language that was used to compile to it (or any target language that could've produced said wasm)?
Only to roughly the same degree that it's possible to decompile x86/64 binaries to C or C++.

It depends heavily on the specific optimizations and obfuscations used, whether or not debugging information was left in, etc.

There's a reason the GPL has a "preferred form for editing" clause.

Yeah, but is that actually required? I don't know much about this, but I'd guess 90% of websites will strip this just like debug info in most proprietary software, 9% don't know about this or forget to remove it, if it's included by default and 1% consciously decides to ship it for transparency.
Then it's no different than minimized javascript...