Re: Grammar checking

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 4:49 AM Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> wrote:
> > The one that works best for me is this Grammarly language server [1].
> It might give better results, but it's proprietary software.

LanguageTool isn't proprietary software, but it is used for SaaSS
where the "premium" tier appears to use rule sets that are not
released with the base tool.  LanguageTool.org is very clear in using
the term "open source" rather than "free" to describe the software
(and configuration files) for its "Basic" service.

Given discussions that have happened in the last few months on this
list, I'm surprised the software maintained by the languagetool
project would be considered suitable for introducing a dependency into
core emacs.  Actually, I'm surprised that sort of dependency would be
ok for a package included in GNU ELPA, or possibly even non-GNU ELPA.

I'm not personally a stickler for using free-vs-OS, but even with my
promiscuous package usage I avoided installing the languagetool
package /  I would be concerned that emacs might start communicating
to languagetool servers by default unless I took extreme care. in
reviewing the package code and committed to doing so for every update.
I'm sure any functionality built into core emacs wouldn't do that, but
I don't know that I would trust the languagetool software project to
never introduce such transactions at some future point.

Lynn