> As a package writer, my main concern is that
> it seems that the package submission process
> require proprietary software (particularly non-free
> _javascript_ by m$ Github).
What I would do, in that situation, is not submit my package to Melpa.
Meanwhile, this aspect of Melpa is an additional reason not to do
anything to lead people to use Melpa.
This seems to be based on the incorrect assumption that package authors must use GitHub to use MELPA. According to the MELPA docs:
MELPA supports git, github, gitlab, and hg (Mercurial) [...]
:url specifies the URL of the version control repository. required for the git, and hg fetchers. [...]
:repo specifies the github or gitlab repository and is of the form user/repo-name. required for the github and gitlab fetchers.
Digging in a bit further, MELPA used to also support EmacsWiki, which it deprecated for security concerns, and Bazaar, CVS, Darcs, Fossil and Subversion, which it deprecated due to lack of use.
~Chad