Re: Emacs as a word processor (ways to convert Word/RTF proprietary files)

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 at 17:23, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>                                     Most collaboration is now happening in
>   > Google Documents (and Sheets), Dropbox Paper, and Notion.
>
> Google Docs is also bad -- because you have to run nonfree software to
> talk to it, and you have to identify yourself and sign an unjust
> contract to be allowed to use it.

Of course you have to identify yourself. It’s a natural consequence of
collaboration, because:

* You want to let a small set of your coworkers to be able to see the
document and comment on it.
* You want an even smaller subset of those to be able to edit it.
* You want to know who made which comment or edit.

(Google also lets you share documents in a way that they can be read,
commented, or edited anonymously, but no one in their right mind will
do that for any kind of sensitive documentation.)

> I never heard of the other three; are they any less bad?

Pretty much the same level of badness. They let an authenticated user
create a document, and share it for viewing, commenting or editing
with other authenticated users. They also provide free-to-use non-Free
UIs for working with those documents, and HTTP-based APIs upon which
alternative clients could be created. Users of such clients would, of
course, have to authenticate themselves, and for security and
convenience reasons that authentication would require executing some
non-Free Javascript.

> It would be a good thing to write an Emacs interface that can talk to
> Google Docs; but if it requires a Google account, I'd still say no.