pbsdp

If you guarantee that your binary has source, it has source. Guaranteed.

If users only want binaries that guarantee they have source, they can insist on only downloading/acquiring binaries from people that guarantee they provide source.

> "Google contributed ports of NaCl for ARM and Amd64."

So, Mono/C# in Chrome? If NaCl/PNaCl becomes available outside the Chrome App Store, that could be pretty exciting -- Mono does an excellent job with AOT performance and mobile-scale memory utilization.

> Your 'logic' is ridicoulus, GPL is no more 'enforcing' sharing than proprietary software is 'enforcing' non-sharing.

You call my logic ridiculous, and then you reiterate my entire point. The GPL is enforcing sharing in the same way proprietary software is enforcing non-sharing.

Whereas the MIT and BSD licenses provide just as many freedoms as the GPL, without enforcing anything. They are, defacto, more free, both for end users and end developers. End users are free to only use open-source products, if they so desire, and developers are free to use liberally licensed open source however they wish to, too.

> Overall your entire line of thought is clearly that developers should not be allowed to share open source unless they allow it to be used in proprietary code, because if they don't they cause 'immeasurable harm' to the software industry.

This is a strawman argument that has no basis in what I actually said.

I think people should be allowed to use the GPL, just like I think people should be allowed to advocate communism. I also think that we should do our best to demonstrate the fallaciousness of their arguments, because they have the capacity to cause significant harm to our industry.

> Whenever I come across someone like you I'm really glad the GPL exists as an alternative.

And whenever I come across someone like you, it is made apparent that the GPL is more of a religion and an a political statement, rather than a reasoned decision made from an understanding of the economic and human realities of industry and our society.

> You dislike GPL because you as a proprietary developer can't use that code, which for some reason you think you have a 'right' to.

You're being obtuse; I've never said what you claim. What I've said, repeatedly, is that the the GPL grants fewer freedoms than liberal licenses such as the MIT license or the BSD license; it doesn't "protect" or "grant" any "freedoms" that the MIT and BSD licenses don't already provide themselves.

What the GPL does do is restrict usage to enforce a quid-pro-quo relationship on its users, with the political goal of leveraging network effects to push a Marxist ideology of dismantling private ownership in favor of shared ownership of the means of production.

If the goal was 'freedom', then it would be enough to provide users with free access to your code; nobody can deny them that free access once it's provided. The goal isn't freedom, however, and painting it as such is both intellectually shallow and dishonest.

> If we speculate wildly, why not an "asm.js restricted operating mode"?

Because we already had Jazelle, and it sucked, and we learned our lesson. A Jazelle that operates on ASCII-encoded bytecode with traps for unsupported JS constructs? No thanks. :)

> Not saying that's a good idea, but I'm not sure why a NaCl one would be either. Both PNaCl and asm.js should reach pretty much native speed anyhow.

Pretty much native and actually native are very different things.

I've had to sit down and hand-optimize critical paths that would not have been viable otherwise, and would have meant discarding a feature, or introducing a significant impact on usability -- and that's on platforms where similar investments in runtime library optimization were already made by the platform vendor, too.

If we're going to throw away performance, it has to be for a good reason. As someone who doesn't spend all day on platform development (as interesting as it might be), my focus is in providing the best possible user experience.

I'd love to do that on the web, but the web needs to punting throwing away solid technology decisions because of the bad technology decisions made in the early 90s when none of us knew what the hell we were doing.

> Btw, the L is not capitalized in NaCl.

Whoops. Thanks. Now I will look less stupid in front of software engineers AND my chemistry buddies. :)

> The point is that NaCl is not portable, just like a native platform such as Windows.

So provide fat binaries. Maximize performance on ARM and i386, with fallback to PNaCL for future platforms that are neither.

> They are even the dominant platforms on mobile.

For a good reason. Adopting their strengths while eschewing their weaknesses (proprietary and single-vendor) would benefit the entire industry greatly.

All you need to do is perform NaCL validation of pages before marking them executable; this is what NaCL already does.

You can either do this through a high-level "JIT API" that generates safe machine code from a validated IR (aka PNaCL), or through a fancier version of mprotect() that validates the actual machine code (aka NaCL).

In a wondrous hypothetical future where processors support a NaCL restricted operating mode, you wouldn't even need to validate; just set the processor state to thumb^Wnacl mode, and define a syscall instruction that switches to direct execution (without actually requiring a context switch to the kernel, just flip an execution flag).

This is why NaCL is so damn interesting, and JS/asm.js is not. NaCL has the possibility of turning our design of restricted execution environments on its head, in a very good (for performance) way.

> And how is the GPL intellectually dishonest? Replacing proprietary software by giving free software developers an advantage is an explicit goal of the GNU project. How is it dishonest?

The usual explanation is "four freedoms" and giving users freedom.

Leveraging network effects to create a communist shared ownership of the means of production is the honest explanation of the GPL, and that has nothing to do with 'freedom', and everything to do with network-enforced Marxist ideals.

> * It's that government-granted monopoly that allows control over other people's means of production. The solution to your problem is simple: fight for its elimination.*

I have no problem with copyright, and I don't want to forcibly eliminate the GPL. I'd be happy for it to die an honest death after careful and rational consideration by the industry.

> ... who are aren't going to make the jump as soon as HTML5 delivers everything they need?

When will that be, exactly? The promise has been a long time coming, and in the meantime, the constitution of the industry is shifting away from a web myopia.

> You know what, never mind; you're an argumentative ill tempered child who doesn't know how to have a discussion properly. Have a nice day.

One of us has stuck to discussing the topic, the other, discussing the person. Good day.