Virtual RMS

This is a simple yet silly sounding terminal application in the spirit of the founding father of software freedom.

It stands, of course, for “Virtual Richard Matthew Stallman”, and all vrms does is warn you if you have any software installed that is not clearly defined as libre / open source.

To install it in Arch:

$ yay -S vrms-arch

For example, when run I get the following:

$ vrms

llvm-libs: ['custom:Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exception']
clang: ['custom:Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exception']
manjaro-icons: []
compiler-rt: ['custom:Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exception']
haskell-wizards: ['custom:BSD2']
python-npyscreen: ['Custom']
img2xterm: ['CC0']
haskell-xss-sanitize: ['custom:BSD2']
lib32-llvm-libs: ['custom:Apache 2.0 with LLVM Execption']
markdown_previewer: []
neovim: ['custom:neovim']
haskell-megaparsec: ['custom:BSD2']
cmark-gfm: ['custom:BSD2']
tzdata: ['custom: public domain']
haskell-constraints: ['custom:BSD2']
haskell-invariant: ['custom:BSD2']
openmpi: ['custom:OpenMPI']

Non-free packages: 17

However, there are 207 ambiguously licensed packages that vrms cannot certify.

It does give a few false positives, but because there are so many packages that don’t have the correct license listed.

If you’re a developer, I would suggest giving your license a bit more thought when you start to distribute it. Having a clearly defined license is important to let others know where they stand in using your code, and more importantly, if you do intend to release your software as open source, make sure that your license is correctly marked as such.