As Eli said, Electron is covered by an MIT license. It describes itself
with this sentence:

  Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

It accomplishes this by uses Node.js, a JavaScript runtime built on the V8
javascript engine of Chrome. Each Electron app comes with its own
integrated copy of Chromium (the "free" parts of Google's Chrome web
browser, released under a combination of 3-clause BSD, MIT, [L]GPL, and
MS's Shared Source licenses). Without intensional malice, I'd call it a
Frankenstein's monster of both code and license.

Its major features are (in my personal opinion): Google invests effort into
making it function well across major platforms, it's "free enough" that it
can be used by various open, free, and commercial projects, and it lets
people make "desktop apps" using the widely-known web stack of JavaScript,
HTML, and CSS. It can use native code via Node's analog of an FFI. This
combination is so widely spread and optimized at this point that it's
possible to get decent performance alongside gui, threaded, network, etc.
code. It also has a reputation for being fairly bloated, in large part
because each Electron app brings its own copy of chromium, V8, node, etc.
Similarly, Electron apps are rarely well-integrated into a particular OS,
since they're mostly WWW technology; whether this bothers users or not is
currently a shifting topic, as ever more new users are used to using
web-based tech for much of their computer needs.

I hope that helps,
~Chad


On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 7:03 PM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> [[[ 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. ]]]
>
>   > software world has today is Electron (which still doesn't cover
> everything
>   > emacs supports).
>
> Is Electron free software?  If so, what is its license,
> and what does Emacs do that Electron does not support?
> (If there are lots of things, a few important ones would
> be enough of an answer.)
>
>
> --
> 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)
>
>
>