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The GNU project takes a strong stand for software freedom. Many times, this means you'll need to avoid certain technologies when such technologies conflict with our ethics of software freedom.
Software patents threaten the advancement of free software and freedom to program. For our safety (which includes yours), we try to avoid using algorithms and techniques that we know are patented in the US or elsewhere, unless the patent looks so absurd that we doubt it will be enforced, or we have a suitable patent license allowing release of free software.
Beyond that, sometimes the GNU project takes a strong stand against a particular patented technology in order to encourage everyone to reject it.
For example, the GIF file format is covered by the LZW software patent in the USA. A patent holder has threatened lawsuits against not only developers of software to produce GIFs, but even web sites that contain them.
For this reason, you should not include GIFs in the web pages for your package, nor in the distribution of the package itself. It is ok for a GNU package to support displaying GIFs which will come into play if a user asks it to operate on one. However, it is essential to provide equal or better support for the competing PNG and JPG formats—otherwise, the GNU package would be pressuring users to use GIF format, and that it must not do. More about our stand on GIF is available at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html.
Software patents are not the only matter for ethical concern. A GNU package should not recommend use of any non-free program, nor should it require a non-free program (such as a non-free compiler or IDE) to build. Thus, a GNU package cannot be written in a programming language that does not have a free software implementation. Now that GNU/Linux systems are widely available, all GNU packages should function completely with the GNU/Linux system and not require any non-free software to build or function.
A GNU package should not refer the user to any non-free documentation for free software. The need for free documentation to come with free software is now a major focus of the GNU project; to show that we are serious about the need for free documentation, we must not contradict our position by recommending use of documentation that isn't free.
Finally, new issues concerning the ethics of software freedom come up frequently. We ask that GNU maintainers, at least on matters that pertain specifically to their package, stand with the rest of the GNU project when such issues come up.