Does vrms find nonlibre software?
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On debian 8 64bit I ran vrms. It found no nonlibre software.
I do not think that can be correct.
To get a document scanner to work, I entered a piece of firmware into a folder. It is highly likely the firmware is nonlibre. Vrms did not find it.
I installed google earth 64bit. Is google earth 64bit libre software? Vrms did not find it.
It's impossible to automatically detect whether or not a program is libre, at least unless you develop an AI that is capable of doing the kinds of evaluations humans can do. vrms is a pretty simple Perl script that checks for packages installed from repositories named "non-free", "multiverse", "restricted", "contrib", and I think a couple others. It can be a helpful tool on Debian and Ubuntu, but it only applies to packages installed through the package manager. Even then, the name "vrms" is a misnomer since what causes a package to be in the non-free repository is the DFSG, not what RMS thinks. vrms may tell you that your Ubuntu system has no non-free software even though Linux is shipped with firmware blobs on that system (making Ubuntu a libre system requires replacing Linux with Linux-libre).
> It's impossible to automatically detect whether or not a program is libre
I got it wrong how vrms works.
> You should absolutely educate yourself about the Google corporation
If I write why I install google earth, I will be told that I am promoting nonlibre software. I do not. Sometimes I use nonlibre software. My computers bios is nonlibre software. I recent that. Not because it is nonlibre software, but because I cannot decide whether I want to use a libre or nonlibre bios.
Do you know why you cannot delete a post? Which I would want to do about this post.
You can't delete posts because the forum is attached to a mailing list, so the whole idea of deleting a post makes little sense. You shouldn't even rely on the edit button for this reason.
You cannot delete a comment either? Or could you?
Many thanks for the clarification. And how do we know if Debian Linux kernel is as free as the Trisquel kernel, if I don’t use the nonfree repos of course.
tonlee, at least you’re totally free to *not* Google, Google is easy to detect and resist, much more than our nonfree bios, as you rightly say, or the backdoored processors we have on our machines.
And how do we know if Debian Linux kernel is as free as the Trisquel kernel
Inspecting the source code. But you can take the word of the FSF that made this inspection:
Previous releases of Debian included nonfree blobs with Linux, the kernel. With the release of Debian 6.0 (“squeeze”) in February 2011, these blobs have been moved out of the main distribution to separate packages in the nonfree repository.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
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