Enumerates non-free packages (that is to say, under licenses not
considered by OSI, FSF, and/or the DFSG to be Free Software) installed
on an ArchLinux system. See vrms_arch/license_finder.py for the
license categorization.
Copyright (C) 2013 Andrew Clunis <andrew@orospakr.ca>.
Released under the New 3-Clause BSD license (trololo!). See
COPYING.
A reimplementation of the original
vrms program from Debian for
Arch's Pacman and ALPM.
List non-free packages (and count currently ambiguous/uncheckable packages, see Caveats)
vrms
Check all packages in locally synced package repositories (does not and can not include the AUR), not just locally installed packages:
vrms -g
Build a package out of local checkout of this source code on Arch:
makepkg --noextract
This works because I include a src symlink that points to ..,
which fools makepkg into using the local checkout as the source.
The same PKGBUILD, without --noextract and the src symlink, will
fetch whatever's on the stable branch of the GitHub repo.
A great deal of packages in Arch, both free and non-free, use custom
as the license field value. As per the
Arch Packaging Standards,
this indicates that the package does not use an exact copy of one of
the licenses included in the core
licenses package,
which provides well-known free licenses at
/usr/share/licenses/common. However, the Packaging Standards go on
to say that the license field can be disambiguated in the form of
custom: ZLIB or custom: PUEL. Sadly, there are 722 packages in
the ArchLinux pacman repositories (Core, Community, Extra, and
Multilib) that specify only custom. Many packages also carelessly
use variant naming of well-known licenses (GPL-2, GPLv2, etc.) in
spite of the Packaging Standards, causing further confusion.
Many commonly used Free Software licenses aren't included in the
common licenses packages because they require editing to be applied
to a given project, such as the BSD and MIT licenses.
The same problems extend to the AUR.