You may be running nonfree programs on your computer every day without realizing it—through your web browser.
Webmasters: there are several ways to indicate the license of JavaScript programs in a web site.
In the free software community, the idea that any nonfree program mistreats its users is familiar. Some of us defend our freedom by rejecting all proprietary software on our computers. Many others recognize nonfreeness as a strike against the program.
Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or nonfree. But browsers run other nonfree programs which they don't ask you about, or even tell you about—programs that web pages contain or link to. These programs are most often written in JavaScript, though other languages are also used.
JavaScript (officially called ECMAScript, but few use that name) was once used for minor frills in web pages, such as cute but inessential navigation and display features. It was acceptable to consider these as mere extensions of HTML markup, rather than as true software, and disregard the issue.
Some sites still use JavaScript that way, but many use it for major programs that do large jobs. For instance, Google Docs tries to download into your machine a JavaScript program which measures half a megabyte, in a compacted form that we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long. The source code of a program is the preferred form for modifying it; the compacted code is not source code, and the real source code of this program is not available to the user.
In addition to being nonfree, many of these programs are malware because they snoop on the user. Even nastier, some sites use services which record all the user's actions while looking at the page. The services supposedly “redact” the recordings to exclude some sensitive data that the web site shouldn't get. But even if that works reliably, the whole purpose of these services is to give the web site other personal data that it shouldn't get.
Browsers don't normally tell you when they load JavaScript programs. Some browsers have a way to turn off JavaScript entirely, but even if you're aware of this issue, it would take you considerable trouble to identify the nontrivial nonfree programs and block them. However, even in the free software community most users are not aware
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