Shifting the Trap
1 points by tusharhero
1 points by tusharhero
This article seems to make exactly the same mistake that Richard Stallman makes regarding software "freedom", that is, mixing up the goal and the means.
The goal is more freedoms for the end user of software. The means Stallman promotes is free (i.e. libre) software. That's fine, but Stallman then goes on to say that anything which is not the means (free software) is antithetical to the goal i.e. any proprietary software limits a users freedom and makes their life worse. This is obvious nonsense - if the choice is between proprietary software and no software, or software that doesn't work, proprietary software doesn't reduce a user's freedom, it increases their freedom.
So the article ends up proposing software that doesn't work (i.e. can't actually download YouTube videos) as a solution to "problem" of running a javascript interpreter on a chunk of proprietary software.
The answer is not submitting to YouTube and switching to PeerTube and friends, which do not treat users like this. So, "it can't work because proprietary software" is much more defensible than, "I didn't tell you that I just run non-free software. Too bad you thought you were not running it.".
yt-dlp supports a ridiculous number of sites: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites.md Disabling external JS execution would turn off downloading for only a small percentage of them. So the software still works*
*: only for websites which can be downloaded using free software**
**: conforming to the definition postulated by Free Software foundation
See, both the author, and FSF are coming from an ideological angle and not a pragmatic angle. In that world view, having a fork/adding a switch that will result in an inability to download youtube videos is the "right" thing to do. It may sound totally ridiculous to some people, but that doesn't make the request "I don't want to inadvertently run non-free software" invalid. This change would make the system even more congruent with the principles, for someone who's following that particular principles)