Re: [elpa] Excorporate: Exchange integration package

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I wrote a library called Excorporate that allows Emacs to talk to an
> Exchange server over the Exchange Web Services API.  I would like to
> release it as a GNU ELPA package.  In the meantime, you can try it out
> like this:

I think I'm going to turn this one down, sorry.

We generally don't want packages that offer support for
proprietary programs.  It's OK for packages to support proprietary
programs "as a side-effect" of supporting something else, but packages
that only support proprietary programs are usually undesirable since
they end up promoting those proprietary programs, which is counter to
the goals of Free Software.

There can be exceptions (typically support for using Emacs on Windows
and Mac OS X platforms), when we consider that such support will
encourage people to rely on Free Software (e.g. Emacs) more than
it will encourage them to rely on proprietary programs.

In this case, I think this argument doesn't work, since you can already
use Emacs to access an Exchange server via IMAP (tho that admittedly
only covers some part of the functionality;and I don't know if other
parts can be similarly accessed via other standard protocols or not).


        Stefan