btrvrms -- a better vrms
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above all, i am looking for a better name than "vrms."
if you have suggestions for a name, send me an email or reply here. feel free to do either of these if you have design/implementation/things to include as well.
someone was running (or suggesting i run) vrms this week and using it as evidence that i didnt need to remove certain files. i was already aware that the libreplanet blacklist for fsdg distros included vrms, as incomplete and misleading. i knew the files were non-free software too, so i found the advice pretty surprising. vrms doesnt have the power to make non-free software free by not reporting it.
while it isnt possible to make a version of vrms that is complete, it is possible to make one that is less misleading. i find the categorised blacklist for hyperbola inspiring as well: https://git.hyperbola.info:50100/software/blacklist.git/tree/ sadly, it is down at the moment. the forums are up again.
when the debian fsg moved away from where rms was on software freedom, they should have considered a new name like ckdfsg instead. i dont think you should name software after rms that makes it so he has to take time out to tell people "actually, i dont endorse this and it misleads people into thinking things about software that i would speak about differently."
so i think the name vrms is one problem, i think the lack of obvious disclaimer that "this program has major limitations and isnt authoritative or conclusive, just a tool for finding more non-free software on your system" is an important problem.
any program that has similar goals should go farther than vrms and do a better job. i intend to let this guide advise the design: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FSDG_Review_Guide
this will inform more people about non-free software and other freedom-related problems, with clear categories like the hyperbola list has.
i do a fair amount of software under permissive licenses, but this one will be gpl3 because the hyperbola list is gpl3 and that is a trivial way to include it. i do think blacklists should be permissively licensed, (they are not software and the copyleft serves very little purpose, which means it is more restrictive without a good cause to make it that way) but thats another story.
new inspiration: i will most likely call it "ckyf"
a riff on "fsck" and "ryf."
feel free to suggest alternatives though. one cool feature of ckyf is it will do installed systems and you will also be able to run it on cd/dvd images, to check live distros for non-free components. i recently automated removing non-free firmware from devuan live, and the design i am thinking of (which will be based mostly on filenames) could have caught the problems in devuan live.
vrms just checks whether any given package is in a repo section named "non-free", "contrib", "restricted", or "multiverse". Any distro that doesn't neatly categorize software in this way, properly (i.e. a deblobbed kernel and not shoving proprietary software into "main"), is not going to work with vrms. So anyone who would trust it for any system other than Debian fails to understand what vrms does.
It's not currently possible to automatically check the license of programs. To do so would require a very sophisticated A.I. which is able to read and fully understand English, as well as do the necessary trawls through code to find license indicators.
i would recommend this just for practical reasons, because i was reading it today as part of my research into just how poor a tool vrms is: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FSDG_Review_Guide
note that automated checking is actually suggested as a useful step (not a guarantee of being fully free.)
vrms only checks items that are in public repos, which is a fact i could use to make a very useful tool. that doesnt mean i would never take it beyond that single purpose, it just means that if i didnt, a useful tool would still exist. ive already noted one major failure of vrms that i could fix.
of course i expect criticism and people telling me it isnt worthwhile to do this. and thats useful, id like to know how many people feel that way.
but i still recommend the fsdg review guide, as this tool will a. help find non-free stuff b. make it very clear what its own limitations are-- avoiding a problem that exists in vrms and c. provide some useful commentary on problems for software freedom that a surprising number of users are quite unaware of.
but negative feedback is expected with this-- from both sides of the fully free fence.
i take a lot of inspiration from teaching and tutoring, and this will be useful to me in that regard. but i plan to be at least thorough enough that people making and promoting free distros would possibly benefit from it.
for example, someone was talking about how to make devuan libre. this tool would find 100% (not a guarantee, a likelihood since im very familiar with devuan and it is mostly free) of problems with the live version, and report them to the user. theres a lot of guesswork that goes into peoples discussion about other distros-- this would reduce it.
this tool will report vrms itself as "a very incomplete and somewhat misleading tool not endorsed by rms himself-- its use sometimes confuses people into thinking their setup is more free than it is." it will come with a runtime disclaimer that it is not itself, perfect in this regard.
i seriously considered whether it should bother checking the contents of archives. if the archive itself is known to be problematic (such as a .deb file or tar.bz from the mozilla website) then it will be flaggable, but i decided not to bother opening archives. "it also wont open encypted files," meaning that this tool is a magnifying glass-- not a microscope.
this will be a tool that if run, suggests that people consider thinking more about their freedom, based on what they have on their computer.
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