this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
1652 points (76.1% liked)
Memes
45317 readers
2226 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair, this should be the other way around. All these foss apps are the teletubbies because they're clunky and have major bugs. Sync is the power ranger.
You're still stuck in 2002 or something? Most of the web is literally FOSS. Gone are the myths of free software being worse when the whole world literally runs on it.
Counterpoint: most Javascript on the web is obfuscated to all hell. While technically you can see the code that's running, it being obfuscated is definitely not in the spirit of FOSS, and largely the open source components of servers are being used to prop up all the closed-source stuff reaching end users.
Counter counterpoint: Often frontend js code is minified so that it is smaller and more efficient to transfer to the browser. For FOSS projects you should still be able to get access to that code, unminified, from the project git repo. In the same way desktop apps often ship as binary executables but you can still see the code that was compiled to build them if you find the source repo.
It does make things harder to debug for an average user but it makes it faster/more efficient to run for most end users (in the case of the desktop or phone app it makes it possible to run without needing compiler toolchains that mom and pop likely wouldn't be able to grasp).
The key thing isn't that what the end user's computer runs is readable and editable but whether the code used to build that artifact is available easily and what restrictions there are on editing and redistributing that code.