Re: Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Chad Brown]

> On 11 Aug 2016, at 21:37, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:
> 
>> The navigational buttons do nothing while the rest of what would
>> show on the homepage without LibreJS deactivated is absent.
> 
> This is unethical and works directly against what we say.  Does anyone
> here know the site maintainers well enough to convince them to fix
> this?
> 
> Please respond if you can try.


The melpa site includes two links at the bottom of the page, one to the source 
of the page, and one to “Javascript license information”. The second one goes 
to:

        http://melpa.org/jslicense.html 

This page is totally viewable in eww, and all of the licenses on it seem to be 
compatible with the GPL according to:

        https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

That said, I imagine that there might be some troubles with LibreJS identifying 
javascript libraries correctly; I’ve heard comments that suggest that LibreJS 
is imperfect at this job so far. 

I don’t use the melpa web site anymore myself, and I don’t have any particular 
connection to the maintainers there myself.

Hope this helps,
~Chad