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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

Ok Stallman, now back to reality where people do own software, they do have legal restrictions on its use, and it's not a human right to circumvent it.

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Yeah and I also own the machine that's rendering the HTML and executing the Javascript. Nobody has any legal right to prevent me modifying my browser and changing how it interprets said javascript.

They do when you want to redistribute it with their name, which is the whole point of this discussion.

The heart of their complaint was not the name. It was the fact that the extension injects code into their site.

So, even more nefarious, and in violation of their terms?

That’s what we’re arguing. Slack should not be able to restrict me from modifying the experience on my hardware.

JavaScript runs on the client genius, not the server. You're not changing their product, your modifying how it is run on your personal machine.

Those terms bind Slack users. This problem goes away if the maintainer doesn't use Slack and has never used Slack. It wouldn't be efficient, but it'd be possible.

If you are using IE to browsing slack, and IE couldn't correctly render it. It is illegal?

> the extension injects code into their site.

But it doesn't inject code into their site, right? The HTTP request is made to the server all the same, nothing modified via the browser, it's all code additive/correction in the extension?

I'm not sure I'd say it injects code in to 'their site', as slacks site never sees the code.

It injects code into the dom model of the users browser.

No, there are two points raised by the cease-and-desist: one was not to modify the experience, and the other was to change the name. These are two independent issues.

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