
Modern Web 101: From Free Software Fetishism to Free Web - cnnx
https://www.nexedi.com/blog/blog-Modern.Web
======
khedoros1
\- I like my files stored where I have access to them and no one else does
(local filesystem storage)

\- I like being able to share files with other people, when I choose to
(Dropbox, GDrive, et al, possibly in an encrypted compression format)

\- I like instant installation. I dislike software changing under me without
my control, being forced to trial-and-error my way through browser choice, not
knowing which build of the software I'm running, not knowing how my experience
may differ from someone else's (AB testing), and not having my data stored
primarily on my local device. (websites)

\- I consider remote storage useful, but not 100% reliable, so I won't use it
for something that _must_ work (cloud storage)

\- I consider remote data processing harmful, more often than not. Not only is
it doing things to my data that I have no control over, but they aren't even
visible to me, even in the sense of "well, technically you could disassemble
the binary and reverse engineer the algorithm..."

\- My use of a platform shouldn't depend on one vendor. NaCl depends solely on
Google. Apparently, NaCl and Pepper are "destaffed"[1], and I think there was
a story the other day about things on the Chrome web store moving away from
being available outside of ChromeOS. It's not a platform that I'd care to
really invest in, right now.

The less important a particular task is to me, the less I care about the
points above. For example: most of my modern games are perma-rented from
Steam, auto updates are on, and my saves are stored "in the cloud".

[1]
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=239656...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=239656#c160)

------
tbirdz
If I understand the article correctly, it's saying that Free Software
developers would better be advancing free software ideals by developing
applications for the Google Chromebook platform. I say Google chromebook, not
"The Web", since all the author's examples are NaCl or apps from the Chrome
web store.

I don't think this is really any different than Free Software developers
writing programs for other closed platforms like Android, iOS, macOS, Windows,
etc.

Sure, it's probably better for the users to have a free software alternative
they can use, but in the end writing free software for these platforms just
ends up adding more value to the platform, and reducing the incentive for the
user to switch to a more free software platform like GNU/Linux.

The other message I'm picking up from the author is that free software
developers are not as interested in web technologies as they should be. I'm
not sure that this is true. There are a large number of javascript projects on
Github, for example. Also there's quite a large amount of free software
projects covering the backend of web development as well. Really the problem
is hosting the service, when there's no money involved. For this, I think some
kind of distributed effort is key, each user "pays" for the service by helping
to serve it to other users.

Maybe the author is speaking about just user-facing applications, not
frameworks, and infrastructure projects? This is also a problem with free
software desktop applications, not just the web.

I guess I would be considered a "free software fetishist" by the author. I
like C, I like vi, I like Linux, I like POSIX, I like CLI, and I don't really
like the web that much, especially for applications. And I don't really see
anything wrong with that. Let the people who are interested in the web work on
it, and I'll work on what I'm interested in.

~~~
angry-hacker
I'm pretty sure it's satire with an interesting intro to chromebooks world.

~~~
walshemj
Or some one hasn't been taking their meds

------
trackpad
My personal reasons for "fetishism":

\- Control: I can see the source of all these old tools, and copy/modify them
if I wish. I don't have to rely on my "tools" being hosted on a black box in
the ether.

\- Privacy: Why would I want to use the internet to host all my files, to edit
all my files, or to search through my files? Just, why?

\- Speed: I am much, much more productive with emacs/vi and the command-line
versus anything else I have ever tried. The only exception might be a desktop
(or web!) app tailored perfectly to a specific custom purpose. But if want to
talk about apps in "general"? Maintaining umpteen tabs in a browser all the
time? Needing to USE a browser?

It reads like you're asking developers to turn away from some of the most
lauded and evolved systems and tools, so the reason needs to be incredibly
compelling. Why?

Now for the (largely) emotional aspect:

\- We love the command line and our extremely powerful text editors. We
believe the "future" should be built on those concepts, or at least built in a
way harmonious with their continued use and evolution.

\- I don't like browsers. But many do, so we can ignore this point really.

I really, really, REALLY hate the direction of companies like Microsoft. I
ditched Windows for Linux a couple of years ago after Office 360 made plain
exactly the direction they intend to push us: all our files will be hosted
somewhere outside of our full control, and ultimately our APPLICATIONS
themselves will be hosted in a similar way.

Some people are strongly opposed to a future of "dumb terminals" and/or
"appliances" and are instead strongly in favor of general-purpose computing as
the future. See:
[http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

------
trizic
He is not advocating Google Chromebooks as an alternative, he is trying to get
you to understand the value and experience you and not tech-savvy users can
get out of it. After you experience it for 3-6 months, create your own FOSS
equivalent of the experience Google and Chromebook have to offer. Now combine
this with open hardware (we have software freedom but we aren't truly free
until we have open hardware) such as the RISC-V ISA. Traditional desktop
software doesn't appeal to the not tech-savvy, but the web will.

Take a look at Synology's software (although closed source), its a great UX
over a Linux environment, all done via web. [https://www.synology.com/en-
us/dsm/6.0](https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/6.0)

------
luhn
The content about the Free Web was interesting. I wasn't aware of all the
things that Chrome was capable of, especially with NaCl, something I've only
briefly heard about. The Free Web movement seems like it will become more and
more important as people and software migrate to the browser.

Yet instead of focusing on education, the primary purpose of the article
seemed to be attacking me. Somehow being a user of vim and git on a POSIX
platform makes me a Free Software Fetishist. Somehow not using open source in
every part of my development stack makes me an enemy of free software. This
article calls me a fetishist and tells me to open my mind to new ideas, then
tells me that there is One True Path. The Free Web coming into being does not
devalue the software that came before it.

An important part of free software is community. The author would do better
with a helping hand rather than a fist to the face.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Yet instead of focusing on education, the primary purpose of the article
> seemed to be attacking me._

Now you know how most developers of proprietary software feel about open
source evangelism.

------
0xCMP
What he's trying to say is: Look at all the people who are almost exclusively
on the web? All the people who will grow up going to the web first. A web
built by those who like free software.

They will want web solutions, but they won't become free software contributors
if they don't have the chance. If we don't build the projects/solutions. So
he's asking you to experience how they view the web so you can develop the
solutions to pain points you only understand by experiencing the web like
that.

~~~
flukus
If they don't care about who controls their data then getting them to care
about who controls their software is a lost cause.

~~~
0xCMP
Just look at our selves. How did we learn to care? Mostly for me it was cause
they explained the problem _and had an alternative_. Most of the times it
wasn't as good, but at least now it was a choice. That choice maybe doesn't
always exist for a web only world.

------
roel_v
Not sure if this is satire? Am I understanding correctly that he's advocating
moving everything to 'web applications' because somehow it'll be more 'free'?

~~~
imtringued
The majority of users use web applications. The majority of web applications
are not free software. You can conclude from this that the majority of users
don't use free software.

The point of the article is to think more like the average user. They will
trade off convenience at the cost of privacy and control if that is what it
takes. However if you offer them convenience, privacy and control without a
tradeoff by creating more free software for the web they are more likely to
use free software.

~~~
roel_v
What's the point of blabbering about vi and emacs then? Those are
fundamentally local tools, why would one ever want to move those into a 'web
application', whatever that means in the context of a text editor?

------
endgame
The author has a decent opening point about how we Free Software Enthusiasts
need to be aware of the world in which regular people are computing, otherwise
we'll never be able to reach them.

If my understanding of history is correct, the GNU utilities were better than
the proprietary UNIX ones: they had sensible defaults, or better features, or
DWIMmmy behaviour (`find` instead of `find .`, anyone?). GNU basically pulled
an embrace, extend, extinguish on proprietary UNIX tools.

If Free Software "fights for the users", then it needs to go to where the
users are, and that's the web. It needs to be better in a tangible way, and
show how the freedoms it provides can help the users. Avoiding DRM and other
user-hostile behaviour is a start, but beyond that I don't know what it should
look like with today's web stacks, but I do believe that's the sort of thing
we have to deliver.

~~~
aethertron
>If Free Software "fights for the users", then it needs to go to where the
users are, and that's the web.

To what extent?

Just because a mass of users are somewhere, doesn't make that environment the
right place for free software. But I'm not saying it's a wrong place. But it's
not the only possible place. A popular environment might be by its nature
unsuitable for free software, and free software developers would be mistaken
to compromise their development by wholeheartedly embedding themselves on that
platform.

What concerns me about the web:

\- the trend has been a move toward centralisation, content silos

\- DRM in the spec now (EME)

\- bloated by necessity (as browsers need backward-compatibility)

\- it's hacky, as a document-retrieval system retrofitted into an application
platform

\- people think it's beyond criticism, probably because of the notion that
it's The One Open alternative to iOS/Android ...

(cf. [https://www.christianheilmann.com/2016/10/05/can-we-stop-
bad...](https://www.christianheilmann.com/2016/10/05/can-we-stop-bad-mouthing-
css-in-developer-talks-please/))

Despite all that, I still like the Web and want it to continue existing. And
if I want a better system, I need to put my money where my mouth is and work
on helping something else become a real practical alternative...

~~~
endgame
Nothing you said is wrong, and I don't really like what the modern web has
become. But I can't see how you'd build a better platform, then build
something that drives adoption of that platform while there's so much dev
attention on the web. Maybe it's possible, and maybe I just lack vision.

~~~
aethertron
Consider that, to do a new thing, we don't need a cohesive platform that
replaces the whole of the web. We can leverage the web, e.g. use it to
distribute native applications, or scripts that run on some new interpreter.

I like the look of the Red language. The goal there is to make a more modern,
open source version of Rebol, which has aspects that tried to directly compete
with the web some years ago.

I suspect the successful modern version of a Red-based open, distributed app
network and hypertext document system will have more of a symbiotic
relationship with the existing web.

------
peller
The author never defined "Free Software Ideals." Maybe I've gone off the deep
end, but as somebody who's tried very hard to exclusively use free software
since I was about 10, I don't think (s)he's coming anywhere close to promoting
them with this article. Have I gone crazy?

Edit: OK, so I read further. Their end goal appears legit, but damn, that
introduction has the opposite effect as it should. Or, perhaps, their target
audience is closed-source users who like to make fun of those of us who have
already escaped?

------
crasm
I think the crux of the matter is that the general population don't really
need much computation. They just care about meaningful data, especially their
own data.

As a programmer and a technophile, computing is the first tool I use for
anything. New pin? Just `tr -cd '[:digit:]' < /dev/urandom | head -c 4` and
write it down. It would be more difficult for me to find a website that
generates pin numbers (and it would be less secure).

I personally value the ability to freely compute. That's why I love my CLI and
my text editor.

You can't easily compute on the web because the web was designed for documents
(data), not computation. Maybe that's the real problem here.

------
dpc_pw
I don't get it. Either it's some weird satire or most ridiculous article I've
seen in a while.

------
shmerl
Why Chromebooks? I'd rather use Linux straight on a normal computer (whether
desktop or laptop). ChromeOS doesn't sound at all like a better way FOSS wise
than let's say KDE Plasma.

And I strongly disagree that privacy should be traded for doing things "the
Google way", even if for a time.

------
davidgerard
This article seems terrible and confused and thinks it makes a point about
terms by clearly not understanding the point of any of them. I'm pretty sure
the author has never read a word Richard Stallman wrote.

~~~
cnnx
I posted the article for a good debate, which I seem to succeed. Though I'm
not the author and we don't share positions, I've never read an article by RMS
either, only about him, and attended a lecture by him. So please, recommend a
good article by Richard, which relates to this article!

~~~
rvern
The JavaScript Trap — [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-
trap.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html).

Who Does That Server Really Serve? — [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-
that-server-really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-serve.html).

------
keithnz
Seems weird, maybe I'm missing something, but it's wanting you to free
yourself from Macs / Windows... embrace free.... then immediately tie yourself
to google?

~~~
api
It's a training phase to experience what the modern web can do.

~~~
redleggedfrog
You don't need a Chromebook and Google to do that. You can run all that junk
in a web browser too, and still have a decent machine to use for serious work.

------
sambobeckingham
I don't get it... Let Google completely absorb my personal data for 6 months
and seriously hinder my workflow - Because?

------
scandox
Kernel of a decent point here buried by pure weirdness of what he advocates as
an alternative.

------
SFJulie
Foreword : For someone whom I have met much more time lobbying/selling the
virtue of Free Software to the administration to have his private owned
companies make benefits from the public money, it is the kind of shaming on
Free Software devs I take a moral stance in NOT accepting. I might have heard
him on the phone asking our company to rig a market by agreeing on price while
on an open invitation to tender. So, I have a strong beef against patronizers
that are worth being patronized.

I still am not convinced by modern web development, not as a free software
devs, but as a user.

I hate above all ... the design and UX.

I cannot convince myself after years of experiencing CLI as a very convenient
way to read infos and automate my task that web is better.

web is about making wrapper around scripts. It is like an animal who has 10 kg
of skin for 1kg of muscle. It is RIGID as a dogma. You cannot pipe web
applications, unify them, have a consistent information. It is pre-historic
IT. I even find curses more interesting.

OS have authentication built-in often done right, but each an every websites
recreate their own poorly. Isn't it a waste of effort and duplication?

What is more troubling is the horrible lack of consistency in the presentation
and method for getting information. The strength of terminal is : consistency,
readable fonts, consistent layout/navigation and fast access to information.
Scrolling the web for information pisses me off. I love man, perldoc, pydoc.
The web is as if you had one kind of man per application, one new ncurses,
keyboard shortcut, files per apps. Web is inconsistent and would deserved to
be questioned as a lingua franca of information technologies.

There is no added value in disrupting a user each an every time he/she does
the classical task of ITs: reading/writing.

There is no consistent handling of most keys like copy/paste/tabs.

There is no «typography» of the web. Information deserves consistency.

We are in 2016 the web is resulting in multiplying the manual copy and
degradation of sensitive information.

I belong to a country where accents in surname are part of our identity. Most
of the web sites still handle this poorly.

And to someone telling me how to exercise my own freedom, I would answer to
the author of the article the worlds of another free software actor in France
(the authors are french btw) I do What The Fuck I want, don't come patronizing
me about how I do exercise my own freedom, especially my freedom of thinking.

~~~
loulouxiv
What do you use in order to read infos via CLI ?

~~~
SFJulie
wonder of CLI you can call firefox, but from firefox, you can't have a shell,
lol.

------
wott
OK, so all this confused discourse is to sell their stuff.

And this:

> We normally hire through traineeships lasting six to twelve months.

This sounds illegal. Possibly for 2 reasons.

~~~
deft
What makes it sound illegal? Genuinely curious.

~~~
malinens
Here were I live You it's always max 3 months

~~~
thanatropism
Paid or unpaid?

I don't think unpaid internships or traineeships are legal here. But a paid
traineeship is essentially a job contract for a limited duration project -- to
wit, "the malineen project".

------
antoineMoPa
There is a paradox about free software users:

Free software users are often talented at making privacy-limiting closed
source /(web)?/ applications, thus limiting the freedom of the other users.
Example: Zuckerberg & facebook.

This makes me wonder: How to lead a successful programming career without
limiting other users' freedom?

~~~
cyphar
> This makes me wonder: How to lead a successful programming career without
> limiting other users' freedom?

Work for a free software company. SUSE and RedHat are the classic examples,
though many others exist. [ Full Disclosure: I work as a free software
developer at SUSE.]

------
imtringued
I don't understand why people buy chromebooks to then enable the developer
mode which can wipe your data if you are careless and then install a different
operating system or crouton instead of just getting a equivalent laptop with
windows and then do the same.

~~~
thanatropism
I thought Chromebooks were like the MacBook Air -- very thin/lightweight.

------
z3t4
My first experience with "the cloud" was around year 2000 when saving a rather
large school project, and after the semester when the next patch of students
was gonna continue the project, the hosting company was gone ... We did
however manage to find the project on the HDD of the computer that had been
used.

When going through the apps recommended by this article, several of them are
abandoned, and some of the reviews says "I lost all my work".

------
pmyjavec
This seems like seriously flawed logic, we give up our tools (which are used
to build Linux and ChromeOS) so we can build a more "free web", using
essentially proprietary / centralized systems in some convoluted way?

I think we're better off putting our faith and efforts into technology like
IPFS if we want to build a more "free web". This seems like the wrong
direction to in.

It seems Google is turning into a privacy disaster, I want less of it in my
life, not more.

------
joeclark77
This could lead somewhere, but I think he's shooting himself in the foot by
dissing vi and emacs. That's like telling a developer his girlfriend is ugly
and then trying to sell him something.

~~~
pjmlp
Not all developers are found of vi and emacs.

~~~
tempodox
Indeed, I prefer vim over vi.

------
qwertyuiop924
The only way Chromebooks are even slightly usable for Real Work is over SSH
and Mosh. I speak as a chromebook user (my school provides them): they're
awful for developers. Almost useless.

------
ungzd
How many layers of irony are in the article?

------
wyager
As opposed to any aspect of web development, UNIX has the nice feature of
being somewhat well-designed. If we're going to try to make a universal
content platform, we should at least wait until someone does a good job of it.
Javascript and HTML are really poor choices for the majority of tasks.

~~~
pjmlp
> UNIX has the nice feature of being somewhat well-designed.

Some people would disagree.

[http://www.vbcf.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/BioComp/training...](http://www.vbcf.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/BioComp/training/unix_haters_handbook.pdf)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Worse than the modern web, though? Unix is at least designed for what it's
used for (mostly), and while X is an absolute mess, it was also designed to do
what it does.

~~~
pjmlp
The sad thing about UNIX fetishism is buying computers able to be 3D graphics
workstations, use them as twm was the latest revolution in window managers and
work as if one just had multiple PDP-11 instances running simultaneously.

In any case POSIX doesn't allow for much more anyway.

As for the modern web, it should just fade back to being the old web with
HTML/CSS and leave interactivity to native applications.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I agree completely on the modern web.

>use them as twm was the latest revolution in window managers and work as if
one just had multiple PDP-11 instances running simultaneously.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean: please work on your grammar.

You seem to be saying that we buy hefty workstations, and then run TWM on
unix, and use them as a bunch of PDP-11s, and that this is bad. I'm not sure I
agree on any of those points.

First off, a lot of us like lightweight WMs: You don't need the glitz, so why
spend the cycles and processing power on it, when you could spend it on, say,
your actual 3d graphics applications? And for many of us, they're just
pleasant to work on.

Secondly, the terminal is an acceptable, and even good, UI for many purposes.

Finally, most unixes support OpenGL, so when you want to do that heavy
graphics work, you can.

~~~
pjmlp
It is bad because the UNIX culture just froze in time.

Computers with the hardware computing power capable of making Xerox PARC
researchers dream of new worlds, are bought and used exactly the same way as
if they were a Sun-3 workstation.

Then Bret Victor does a presentation and everyone is amazed what proper
desktop programming environment should be capable of.

No wonder, that the majority of the developers, which actually cares about the
overall desktop experience has moved into macOS or back to Windows. Which are
also the biggest communities producing applications for mobile devices.

As Rob Pike, a person that might know one or two things about UNIX, puts it

"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date.
We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design
of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of
different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the
last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to
music by David Cassidy."

\--
[https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...](https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-
pike-responds)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
In some ways. I'm willing to accept that there may be better paradigms out
there. However...

>Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David
Cassidy.

Unix can be used as a base for many things. I've written code in a Smalltalk
environment written by Alan Kay, Hacked on Scheme and Lisp code inside of
Emacs (not ideal, but lightyears ahead of the standard write-compile-test
cycle that plagues the industry), written code in an entirely visual
programming language, and many other things, all inside of Unix. It may not be
the best system for supporting such things, but it works, and that counts for
a lot.

I may listen to David Cassidy, but that doesn't mean I can't put on some Daft
Punk every once in a while.

The other matter is, of course, that you and Rob Pike wouldn't agree on what
is a better OS: Pike's vision likely hews closer to Plan 9, a system that you
would likely find too close to Unix.

At the end of the day, Unix can kind of suck. I mean, I like it, I'm by no
means a Unix Hater, but it has issues, it's not perfect, and we should look at
alternative systems in the future. But it _works_ , and it makes most of the
people happy most of the time. That's something its competitors still can't
really say. And while Unix has (to some degree) learned from what those
competitors do well, something that many of its competitors didn't really do
(save Windows (Mac is actually part of the Unix family): While I don't really
like PowerShell, I can't deny it's an interesting idea, and potentially a good
one).

At the end of the day, all systems suck. Unix sucks more than many, but
perhaps less than most.

If that was contradictory and incoherent, well than so are my opinions on
Unix, and OSes in general. Also, most of what I write is pretty nonsensical
anyways, so I'm not sure how different this is anyways.

~~~
pjmlp
> The other matter is, of course, that you and Rob Pike wouldn't agree on what
> is a better OS: Pike's vision likely hews closer to Plan 9, a system that
> you would likely find too close to Unix.

Actually we are quite in sync there, as the latest version of Plan 9 was
actually Inferno with Limbo as the main programming language for the user
space layer.

And Plan 9, specially ACME, has quite a few Oberon influences as well.

Right now, the only thing I mostly disagree with him are some of the design
decisions regarding Go.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Really? I'm quite shocked... Oh. Wait, it's because I keep confusing you with
lispm. He would find plan9 lacking, you wouldn't. This makes sense.

 _bangs head on wall_

ACME was cool. It's not quite enough to make me switch from emacs, especially
stripped from the plan 9 environment, but it's enough to make me drool with
envy, especially over the structured regexes and powerful piping tools.

Well, I know what my summer Elisp project is.

>only thing I mostly disagree with him are some of the design decisions
regarding Go.

Frankly, I'm not shocked. Nobody I know that has similar opinions to you likes
Go, and I can understand why.

As a Schemer, I can respect minimalism in design: The question is whether Go
chose the right ideas to implement/not implement. The jury is still out, but
it seems to be leaning toward no.

------
boggydepot
Does the author mean "Free Software" as in Freedom (free software movement)?
Doesn't seem so.

------
aries1980
We have laptops to overcome the fact we don't have electricity all the time.
How web-only people will overcome the unreliable network?

------
qplex
TL;DR: socially fun "one click" JavaScript free software development

