Today we're launching the first in a series of features on how to use common websites without using proprietary JavaScript. You may not be aware of the dangers of JavaScript -- a problem we've deemed The JavaScript Trap -- proprietary software running on your computer, inside your web browser. The focus of our first feature is Google's Gmail service.

Loic J. Duros has written an extension for Mozilla Firefox (and derivatives) that aims to fix the issue of non-free JavaScript Richard Stallman has written about in The JavaScript Trap. The extension is in beta test phase and more interested people are invited to take a test drive and comment.

"The intersection of ethics, law, business and computer software is the subject of these essays and speeches by MacArthur Foundation Grant winner, Richard M. Stallman.

In 1985, Richard Stallman released "The GNU Manifesto," in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs. Software vendors required him to agree to license agreements that forbade sharing programs with others, but he refused to "break solidarity" with other computer users whom he assumed also wanted to use free software.

Richard M. Stallman is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system; he initiated the Free Software Movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.

"Richard Stallman was reading computer books before he'd ever seen a computer. When the Sixties Revolution was running out of steam, he was liberating MIT computers from behind locked doors and helping set off the next great Boomer movement. Though he disdained hippies and radicals in his youth, today, as the leader of the Free Software Movement, he's a long-haired rebel coder-writer with a cause, and an idealistic thorn in the side of the cyber world's killer-app capitalists..."

"Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner [...] «It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,» he told The Guardian..."

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just released in tandem the second edition of its president and founder Richard Stallman's selected essays, Free Software, Free Society, and his semi-autobiography, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution.

"Richard Stallman, Founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, inaugurated the Centre for Excellence in E-governance in Department of Management Studies,Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi on Thursday, December 18, 2008 as part of 6th International Conference on E-governance (December 18-20, 2008)..." --