I've talked about cloud...

I've talked about cloud...

The sentence previous to the one you quoted was "Of course, none of this is necessary if you have direct access to the data in question because you're running it on your own server."

Yes, but I'm not running GMail on my own server! This was side-note about cloud. Even if you are NOT using "your own server" your data is not always held hostage: it's trivial to pull all data from GMail via IMAP (and it's probably good idea to do this from time to time - who knows when Google will declare you nasty spamer and remove your account?). So it's not true that people who are using hosted systems "already lost". But it's much better to use sane protocol (IMAP) for that rather then try to pull the data via "free JavaScript".

IMAP is direct access to the data in question, I'm not sure why you think we disagree on the uselessness of replacing the client-side JavaScript.

This is not about client-side JavaScript. This is about cloud: as long as my data can be pulled out of cloud I don't particularry care if cloud server is free software or not (I don't have resources to run my own replacement anyway): it's acceptable situation (of course free software is better... but it's only one factor out of many). If my data is held hostage on server and can only be accessed by JavaScript client - I don't really care if it's free software or not: I'll try to avoid such service as much as possible.