Re: Making GNUS continue to work with Gmail

[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. ]]]

  > The flow as I once implemented it could be adapted to Emacs as follows:

  >  * The Emacs documentation specifies the user what type of Google
  >  * Cloud project has to be created and what client ID / secrets
  >  * have to be configured.

  >  * After configuring this information, the user starts an Emacs
  >  * command (eg M-x retrieve-oauth-credentials)

  >  * This command starts a local webserver and opens the address in
  >  * the user's browser

  >  * The webpage displayed allows the user to start the OAUTH2 flow
  >  * which redirects to the local webpage with the OAUTH2 token

Does that web page function using nonfree software?  (Javascript code,
for instance?)  Knowing Google, I suspect that it does.

If so, we cannot distribute that function, or suggest to users that
they use that page, or have code in Emacs which presumes that they do.

This is a fundamental moral principle of the GNU Project: we hold that
running a nonfree program is never a legitimate solution to any
problem.

We cannot impose that principle on anyone, and we do not try; but we
have a duty not to speak in a way that contradicts it.

It might be possible to write free code which talks to that page
using some (perhaps undocumented) API and avoids that issue.
That would be good.

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