unfortunately I found some non-free stuff inside PureOS’ software center. The center says the license is “Proprietary”. Did this get in there on purpose or by accident?
“This repository is for development and testing purposes. Contributions are welcome, but you are NOT ALLOWED to use any un-released material for your own projects without our permission!”
You may remove this software from the repository, since it’s non-free and ignores the guidelines for free software by the FSF & by that means PureOS doesn’t follow the guidelines for free GNU/Linux distributions. There maybe other non-free software as well. But as soon as I notice it, I will inform you about it. But please remove it.
Freedom issues are very important and are taken quite seriously by Purism and PureOS. Otherwise, they would not have gotten the FSF’s endorsement for PureOS.
Thank you for noticing these issues and bringing them to the attention of others. Please report them on the PureOS bug tracker so that the developers of PureOS can remove offending packages in a timely manner.
@mrmrrs The reason you are seeing “WolfenDoom” and other proprietary applications in the software center is because you have snapd and gnome-software-plugin-snap installed. These applications are not coming from the PureOS repositories, but from the Snap store, as highlighted below:
@david.libremone Thank you for your response. I’m glad, that those applications are not directly coming from Purism:) So the Software Center stops displaying any foreign packages or snaps, if I uninstall snapd & gnome-software-plugin-snap?
And is there any possibility to check if there is any proprietary software installed on my machine? Like by command line or so?
First I thought you were trolling me with the vrms command relating to Stallman (who I truly admire) being so strict about proprietary software, because it seemed just so absurd. But it actually exists & works perfectly
So, I did not uninstall snapd or gnome-software-plugin-snap by now, but instead just installed vrms through apt install vrms & then typed vrms, receiving the following output:
“No non-free or contrib packages installed on DAW! rms would be proud.”
I love this program, seriously. It made my day. LOL
Bigup to “Bdale Garbee” & “Bill Geddes” for coming up with this software:D
@mrmrrs@wctaylor I suspect that vrms only checks against packages installed with apt. This covers packages from the PureOS repo and any other apt repos you have added. This would not apply to packages installed with snap or flatpak. To perform a manual check on those packages you can list them as follows:
snap list # packages installed with snap
flatpak list # packages installed with flatpak
Note that packages from any external sources you have configured (e.g. Snap Store, Flathub) will still appear in the Software Center, so you still need to check the license field before installing.
I’ve noticed more proprietary software that isn’t from the snap store. Terminator the terminal emulator in the software center is designated proprietary, and its source is pureos-green-main. This program can also be installed from the command line with apt.
The Atari small font also says it has a proprietary license. Also when I first received my laptop, there was a proprietary program pre-installed which I removed. I thought it might have been a bug and really didn’t think about it. I forgot which one it was, but I believe it was another font or something.
After trying to find Terminators license from its website, from what I can find it seems that it is licensed as GPL v2. I am not 100% sure, I’m still new to this, but it seems like it could be a mistake in the software center. It’s strange though because when I used Ubuntu, I saw it with the same proprietary license in their software center. So I’m not sure.
You might be confused because you didn’t do your homework. FWIW, I don’t think there’s an actual license called Proprietary. What it should have had in the license field was GPL2, but I only know that because I read the source code.
