

Ask HN: Are websites generally considered to be free or nonfree software? - Osiris

I was listening to talk today by Richard Stallman regarding free software. He spoke about Facebook and it dawned on me that nearly every website does not meet the criteria for free software.<p><i>Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.</i><p>While client-side code for websites is freely available for review, most websites contain server-side code that is not. To me, it seems this would not be free software.<p>To judge this criteria I went to www.gnu.org and was unable to locate any mechanism for obtaining the source code for the site. There is, for example, a search function. That POSTs a request to the server which runs some algorithm and returns data back. However, it does not seem to be possible to determine what's happening on the server side.<p>So my question, and maybe I'm looking at this wrong, is do members of the free software movement see web sites as free or non-free?  Is there such a thing as a free web site and what would one have to do to make sure that a website could be considered free?
======
lumberjack
Stallman already addressed this.[1]

In short it depends on the type of network service being provided. He doesn't
consider websites that provide information to be non-free because the only
processing done by the server is the transmission of information. He does
however consider more complex websites such as SaaS portals and web apps to be
non-free.

This is also not a very clean situation. For example, who owns the software,
the webmaster or the user? Note that in case of desktop software the user
always owns at least a license of the software even if only to run a compiled
binary for a limited amount of time with restrictions. And further more unlike
desktop software you are not running the software on your machine.

Does one have the right to demand the source and modification rights of a
piece of software just because it is serving them information despite no
processing their information and not running on their machine?

1\. [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-
serve.html)

------
jfaucett
I suppose they're "non-free" in the sense that very few websites provide
access to their server-side source & dbs. However, the are a couple of caveats
that make them free (in a sense) in my opinion.

1\. All final content is free (images, videos, html, css, js/json), an anology
would be if in a closed src game you had access to use/download all the 3D
models, music, dialogs, voice overs etc.

2\. For the vast majority of websites, all the server-side stuff (the "non-
free") is built on free / open source technologies, i.e. Apache, postgres,
redis, java, ruby, all the frameworks, etc.

3\. Information about the web / its technologies on the web is ridiculously
ubiqitous, the amount of open/free knowledge, documentation, and resources is
for all practical purposes limitless.

so this makes reverse engineering or understanding virtually any website a
much simpler task than non web based software, for instance, ERP systems such
as SAP which are closed source and fully proprietary. So you are right,
however, there's a lot of openess and freedom in the majority "non-free"
medium of web software.

~~~
lotyrin
1\. Only if they're licensed as such, or we're willing to completely disregard
IP (which would be very bad).

2\. That's nice, and in some cases successful web software causes significant
contribution to FOSS (many examples from Facebook), but there's nothing
preventing the same from client-side software (id Software's engines for
instance).

3\. I'd say this is also true for many client-side technologies.

However, the SaaS model allows developers to take advantage of GPL code
without an obligation to contribute back, as the y aren't shipping any
derivatives of the code, simply providing network access to it. (Whether
that's good or bad is left to the reader.)

Many people complain about SaaS for it's strengthened ability to create vendor
lock-in, but for non-technical users it's effectively the same. (It doesn't
matter of the data's stored on your computer or in a remote database if you
don't know how to open it.)

------
mattdw
The Affero GPL [1] is a specific license to address this, because existing OSS
licenses have no specific clauses regarding network software; the idea of
"distribution" is generally considered as "the computer on which the software
is running."

[1]: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html>

------
vhf
Websites are like software : they are non-free unless they're free.

gnu.org is not free. Some websites are free, but they are very rare.

I still got an example[1] (although in french). A website about functionnal
programming, featuring courses and a forum. Link to the code is in the footer
("Code du site", i.e. "Website's code") linking to
<http://gitorious.org/pm/pm>

[1] <http://progmod.org/>

------
benologist
It's quite a bizarre situation really, a lot of websites are built on or
leverage open source software and even give shout outs to what they leverage,
but really what we do is more closed source / black box than any desktop
software ever was.

Reddit's the only actual open source website I know of (aside from
forum/blog/etc kind of stuff).

~~~
digisign
Slashdot too.

------
sharth
In your particular example, gnu.org, the source code is available at:

* <http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/www>

* <http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/?root=www>

------
aleprok
I have thought about this same thing and I think the source code of gnu.org
should be available. In my mind websites are non-free as long as they do not
give the back end code.

