Re: NonGNU ELPA work

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Yes, as the important word here is "depend on", not "use at all" most
  > cases I can imagine where someone would break this rule would also be
  > bad design (think of someone hard-coding Google Chrome as a browser
  > instead of using `browse-url').

That is the right way to understand it.  If a program runs the user's
specified default browser and the user has specified Chrome, the user
is responsible for that outcome -- the program is not.

It's unlikely that Lisp packages would make this mistake for browsers
-- though NOT impossible, and we should check.  But it is much more
likely to happen with some more specialized nonfree program that has
no free replacement.

For some hackers, the argument that "There's no
other way to make this work" would persuade them it is ok.

They may take for granted that "a nonfree program better than no
program"; they may never have encountered anyone who would disagree.
Showing them that the GNU Project does disagree with that premise will
help a lot.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)