Long answer short: the maintainer has a vested interest in promoting harrow (his company).<p>I am sure there are many technical solutions to avoid the dependency.<p>I, for one, see no issue with this whatsoever. This is just a minor self-promotion in return for a great piece of software that I get for free. I wouldn&#x27;t have known harrow before this otherwise. How is this any different from gmail or youtube or whatever which bombards us with bazillion ads using our data? Want to use the free software, put up with the ads.<p>Maybe the maintainer should make a paid version that removes this dep and see how many people are willing to fork up the money (my guess: very few).