9.2 Interoperation with Nonfree Applications

It is quite usual to implement features in GNU programs to make them work conveniently with widely used nonfree tools and applications. But there are situations where you should not implement cooperation with a nonfree program, which we can refer to here as ShackleMe.

• If ShackleMe is not well-known, reject the idea. GNU packages should not even mention an obscure nonfree program (see References in GNU Coding Standards).
• If ShackleMe imposes something particularly nasty or dangerous, such as effective DRM or monopolistic file formats, you should refuse to give it any specific support. But don’t cripple general features so that they refuse to work with ShackleMe; that would be excessive. It is ok to write code to extract the user’s data from such files, if that is possible.
• If ShackleMe does not run on the GNU operating system, and there is no comparable free program that people could use on the GNU system to do the same job, special support for ShackleMe would be a feature that works on non-GNU systems only. Thus, you should refuse to support it. See Non-GNU-only Features.
• If ShackleMe runs on GNU systems also, you can include support for it if you wish, but you don’t have an obligation to include that, let alone ever to run it. If you do include support for it, make sure the support for communicating with it works as well on the GNU system as it does on non-GNU systems.
• If there are free programs that can replace ShackleMe, or try to, make sure your program works with them as well as it is reported to work with ShackleMe, or better.
• You never have an obligation to write, install or maintain any sort of support for a nonfree program. If it is unmaintained and breaks, and nobody else wants to maintain it you can delete it. Don’t feel trapped into working on it!

See Suggested Responses, for text you can use, if you wish, to state your refusal to support ShackleMe without equally good support for ShackleMe’s free competitors. Its purpose is to invite the contributors to support those. You can modify it as needed to fit the situation.