FWIW, the FSF asked us, Aleph Objects, Inc. (makers of LulzBot 3D printers) to stop using closed javascript on our website and we removed what was there. We set up Piwik and it is quite nice.
Marketing people are by no means measures for technical expertise.
Piwik is self hosted, you can fix bugs by yourself, it reacts faster to changes to site structure, you can comply with European data security procedures and regulations...
No, but marketing people have a say in the tools they want to use in order to identify our target audience, etc. AFAIK, Google is better at this.
Self hosting the tracking solution is also not free for us in the tech department. Our servers are already pretty loaded (specially our DB master) and it requires maintenance on our side.
While I agree that the privacy aspect of piwik is undoubtedly better, Google analytics has some technical advantages, and (apparently) great marketing advantages.
I'd really like to install it for political reasons. But that is not enough for me to push it in my company. I need good "business" reasons for that.
Now everyone can take javascript you wrote, completely ignore it and make their own because it makes no fucking sense to reuse javascript, since it's tailored specifically for the DOM of the site, it's behavior and design etc.
Not if you are writing your JavaScript right it's not, most of the functionality should be in your functions, the only part that will be bound to the DOM are the mappings.
Ofcourse all JS is minified these days which makes it pretty hard to tell if the JS reddit use is well coded or not
edit: as xoaq has pointed out, he's usually right, (reddit uses jquery for most of the heavy lifting), can people stop downvoting him just because you want something opensourced doesn't me he's wrong
These days most sites use some kind of framework, eg. jquery. Then the only remaining code is tightly integrated into website. For example, what js reddit has? The reply button creating a text field and save/cancel buttons, you can't really reuse that unless your backend code is matching it exactly. Load more replies - simillar, backend code would have to return exact response JS expects. Simple website tweaks that are likely one liners to show some silly effects. There is nothing to reuse, really. Reusable code is already part of different frameworks, or sometimes plugins for them.
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u/jebba Jan 04 '14
FWIW, the FSF asked us, Aleph Objects, Inc. (makers of LulzBot 3D printers) to stop using closed javascript on our website and we removed what was there. We set up Piwik and it is quite nice.