Sunday 20 July 2014

vrms (Virtual Richard M. Stallman)



I was intrigued by the sound of the vrms (Virtual Richard M. Stallman) program when I was surfing the web. It analyses the packages you have installed on your Linux machine and reports all of those that are non free. Originally developed for Debian you can get it on Arch from the AUR. If you use 'packer' you can simple install with :

$ packer -S vrms-arch

The program when run enumerates non-free packages which officially is "under licenses not considered by OSI, FSF, and/or the DFSG to be Free Software".

More info on the license categorization is found via

$ vi /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/vrms_arch/license_finder.py

List non-free packages and count 'ambiguously licensed packages that vrms cannot certify.'

$ vrms

Check all packages in locally synced package repositories (does not and cannot include the AUR), not just locally installed packages:

 $ vrms -g

The caveats with this method in Arch are because many packages in Arch, both free and non-free, use custom as the license field value. This means that it does not use an exact copy of one of the licences includes in the core licences packages which you can view under :

$ ls /usr/share/licenses/common/

Some common licenses like BSD and MIT are not included in the common licenses packages as they require to be edited for a specific project.

Desite these cavets I found it a useful tool to run on my various Arch systems!







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