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A comment on WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps. Parent comment

Re:WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps by Klathmon on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @10:48AM (#14497610)
1. is identical on linux distros. How many licenses are you using right now? Probably 20+ distinct licenses as a lowball guess. It's not easy to figure this out, and if it's something you and others really want, i'm sure a standard could be thought up to be able to on-demand get a list of software licenses used in a project which could then be built into browsers similar to sourcemaps.

2. might be more possible with WASM than it is with minified JS since WASM has a text mode which is very readable.

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Re:WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps by peatmoss on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @11:15AM (#14497863)
1. Eh, if I'm running, say, Ubuntu and haven't turned on the non-free stuff I can make some reasonable assumptions about my baseline rights.

2. I don't think anyone is claiming minified JS is awesomely transparent. WASM is certainly worse than the unobfuscated, unminified JS, which until not long ago was the norm.

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Re:WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps by mbrock on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @11:06AM (#14507027)
WebAssembly in itself is not an enemy of freedom, as even Richard Stallman would agree.

The bigger problem, which is also a problem with web scripts in general, is that browsers and script distributors generally make no effort to inform users about what scripts are running, whether they are proprietary or free software, etc.

Mozilla should fix this!

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Re:WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps by jononor on Thursday June 08, 2017 @01:27PM (#14515633)
I wish that:

- Wasm (and JS) should have metadata (loadable before executing the code) declaring the license, and pointing to the source

- Browsers should whether site is open source (per OSI), and allow to block non-open JS. Or fake access to any sensitive APIs for non-open code (can still do DOM interactivity)

The builds should ideally be reproducible, and community-based third-party sites verify the output comes from said source. This would be another badge/warning/setting.

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