Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Marcel Ventosa]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 23:59:07 -0400
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> I hope that only a minority of Emacs users know about MELPA, and I'd
> rather not inform the rest about it.  But if something is going to
> inform them anyway, it is better to do it with a denunciation.


I've been using Emacs (and MELPA) for the best part of a decade and
knew nothing about this! I'm concerned to use only free software and
actively avoid proprietary software, so this is a bit of a shock.

Is there anywhere I can read more about this issue?

I think this illustrates well why any initiative related with GNU (even
by association) should avoid mentioning proprietary software without a
clear warning and should, in fact, do its utmost to educate users about
free software.

I've used Trisquel, Parabola and Replicant for many years, and in all
of those cases, installing proprietary software is purposely made
difficult (For example, using a `your-freedom' package in Parabola. It
makes sense to force a user to actively remove `your-freedom' if he or
she wants to install a proprietary program; difficult to do so by
mistake.

In fact, I would go the extra mile and say Emacs should expressly warn
users over the dangers of installing proprietary software from
unofficial repositories (by the way, I always just assumed MELPA was
somehow official and related to ELPA, because its name is so similar to
ELPA). This survey could provide a good opportunity for such
information/education.

Over the years, as I worked on my emacs configuration, I read many
other confiruations, but none (that I recall) gave any warnings about
MELPA, so I never thought twice about it.

Any other caveats regarding unwittingly running proprietary software
inside of Emacs?

Sorry to derail the conversation.

Marcel