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Quick 'N' Dirty Check for NonFree Packages in 15.0/current [message #84] Sun, 30 January 2022 00:28 Go to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
DISCLAIMER: The process I am about to describe is in no way official or endorsed by anyone, including myself. I have not thoroughly checked every single package in Slackware64-current for its license status. So, take this with a grain of salt, and perhaps the start to a converstaion, if you are interested.

Here is what I did: Starting with the Slackware64-current changelog (which stretches back to the day 14.2 was released...), I grep'd for any entry with the word "Added", output that to a text file. I did the same for the word "Removed".

I focued on the Added file. First I removed the line for any package from extra/ or testing/, since those are usually not part of a base install.

Then, I removed all the new kde/ packages, because I assumed everything in the KDE set is free in some way. I could be wrong here, but it was a huge time-saver to make that assumption. Truth be told, I do not use KDE anyway, so I might have given it a closer look if I actually used it at all.

With what remained, I looked up the license for each new package that had been Added but not ruled out by one of the steps above.

I first checked in /usr/docs/<packagename> to see what the license said there. When in doubt, I checked it against packages.archlinux.org as well as packages.gentoo.org. I also checked the corresponding git/sourceforge repositories when I was still doubtful.

I deleted the line for anything that seemed to be sufficiently free. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a license expert, so I may have made some technical errors here. However, most of the licenses were obviously free with no further investigation needed.

When all that was said and done, one package remained:

x/skkdic-20200128-noarch-1.txz: Added.

This is a dictionary file, and it has an intersting back-story. Alas, it is not free though, at least not from what I can tell. Here are the /usr/doc files.

Beyond that, I could not find any new non-free programs that have been added since the relase of 14.2. Several non-free packages have been removed or moved into extra/, as mentioned in a previous thread.

Here are my text files that I used for this exercise. Again, I was not as thorough as one could be, I may have overlooked a package or two. I did this about a year or two ago, and I got the same results, so that is reassuring at least.

The point is this: Even if Freenix 15.0 never gets released as an actual distro, I think the desired results could be achieved by just removing everything that was excluded from 14.2, switch to a libre kernel, and then also remove the skkdic file as well. You might also want to add the offending packages to the slackpkg blacklist. At that point, you should be running something close to Freenix-15.0(RC3++) unless I missed something. Feel free to agument my findings if you are aware of any others.

Just thought I would share my preliminary findings. Thanks for reading.

Re: Quick 'N' Dirty Check for NonFree Packages in 15.0/current [message #88 is a reply to message #84] Tue, 24 May 2022 09:12 Go to previous message
metaBLAG is currently offline  metaBLAG
Messages: 5
Registered: May 2020
Location: north america
Junior Member
Thanks for posting this. Very informative/helpful.

[Updated on: Tue, 24 May 2022 09:13]

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