Re: oauth2 support for Emacs email clients

[Gregory Heytings]

> Can someoe point me at the _precise_ agreement text for this? Then the 
> FSF could actually study the question.
>
> Part of what we would have to think about is whether agreeing would 
> enable us to fix the problem by including these tokens in the Emacs 
> release. If we didn't include them, the agreement would (as far as I can 
> see) do no good.

Sure.  Google's TOS are available here : 
https://developers.google.com/terms (accessible without JavaScript). 
Just in case, I attach a PDF version.

The two points that are relevant to this discussion are :

4.a.1: "When using the APIs, you may not (or allow those acting on your 
behalf to) [s]ublicense an API for use by a third party. Consequently, you 
will not create an API Client that functions substantially the same as the 
APIs and offer it for use by third parties."

4.b.1: "You will keep your credentials confidential and make reasonable 
efforts to prevent and discourage other API Clients from using your 
credentials. Developer credentials may not be embedded in open source 
projects."

Point 4.a.1 prohibits your idea of "tak[ing] a part of Thunderbird and 
modify it into a mail-fetcher program that produces an inbox file, for use 
in place of GNU movemail".

Point 4.b.1 prohibits the inclusion of application credentials in free 
software projects.  Because of this each user has to create their own 
application credentials, which makes the authentication process much more 
complicated than with already registered applications, in which the 
authentication process only requires one to enter credentials (login and 
password) in a browser.

Google-API-TOS.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document