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by close04 2454 days ago
> A lot of non-free software is written in Javascript

Dropping JS will just lead to a lot of non-free software written in [something else]. It's not like non-free software will suddenly stop existing. You're not banning English because of the content that might use it.

There must be a better approach to this than "I'm not running any code because some of it may be non-free".

1 comments

It is server site rendering, use whatever you want to generate an html file and send it to the browser, most websites can do this (blogs,news, forums) then the small interactive interactions you can make them in JS using GPL/BSD whatever.
> then the small interactive interactions you can make them in JS

With JS enabled any site could potentially run non-free code so this has no benefits. As far as I can tell the proposed solution wasn't to develop some tech that ensures (somehow) that all functionality JS provides is transferred to something "free-only" but rather to give up that functionality entirely. That's not a solution, that's just running away from the problem.

Sometimes there is no practical solution, and running away is the pragmatist approach
I'm not seeing any reasonable evidence of a consensus that this even is a problem. Let alone that there is no other solution than to run from it.

There's no fix for criminal activity on the internet (objectively worse than non-free code) and yet I don't think anyone (RMS included) is proposing to sever the connections just to make sure they don't accidentally encounter such activity. The more radical comparison would be "bad stuff" in society and completely isolating yourself from it.