Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Po Lu]

chad <address@hidden> writes:

> As Eli said, Electron is covered by an MIT license. It describes itself with 
> this sentence:
>
>   Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
>
> It accomplishes this by uses Node.js, a JavaScript runtime built on
> the V8 javascript engine of Chrome. Each Electron app comes with its
> own integrated copy of Chromium (the "free" parts of Google's Chrome
> web browser, released under a combination of 3-clause
> BSD, MIT, [L]GPL, and MS's Shared Source licenses). Without
> intensional malice, I'd call it a Frankenstein's monster of both code
> and license.
>
> Its major features are (in my personal opinion): Google invests effort
> into making it function well across major platforms, it's "free
> enough" that it can be used by various open, free, and commercial
> projects, and it lets people make "desktop apps" using the
> widely-known web stack of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It can use native code 
> via
> Node's analog of an FFI. This combination is so widely spread and
> optimized at this point that it's possible to get decent performance
> alongside gui, threaded, network, etc. code. It also has a reputation
> for being fairly bloated, in large part because each Electron app
> brings its own copy of chromium, V8, node, etc. Similarly, Electron
> apps are rarely well-integrated into a particular OS, since they're
> mostly WWW technology; whether this bothers users or not is currently
> a shifting topic, as ever more new users are used to using web-based
> tech for much of their computer needs.

Electron has freedom issues.  (https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1167)