Is Slackware Completely Free Software?
 

Just curious about this fact. I checked http://slackware.com/info/ and did a forum search.

It's completely free in that you can download it no fee, but if you want to save yourself the bandwidth, you can pay $60 USD for a DVD or CD set.

If you mean free as in open-source, no. Well, the installer and all that jazz - the absolute hand-written internals of Slackware are open-source, but it includes some non-free (non-open source) applications, like Firefox, in its default install.

EDIT: That URL you posted is slightly out of date, even though it's on the official Slackware site. It stipulates in the last block that it runs on the 2.4 kernel, when - in fact - Slackware 12.0 was the pivotal version that switched to the 2.6 kernel.

Firefox is an open-source package but is usually compiled by its developers and then is given for everybody.
I wonder if building it by ourselves would be more complicated than compiling Vlc along with all deps as I did some months ago :)

What is not opensource about FF (except the brand...)?

Mozilla Firefox is OpenSource. The fact that Open Source does not equals to Free Software.

More than that, the Software to be free should be GPL v.3, not less than that.

I haven't checked all the packages, but so far all the ones I've seen are FLOSS. Note that it doesn't have to be under GPL to be FLOSS.

HPLIP?
Xv certainly not.
And several drivers included in the Linux kernel are closed source.

Think again ;)

And so I did. :)
And Google'ed a bit...
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/20...-drivers-.html
http://www.linux.com/articles/35692
I don't know how the actual status at the moment is, but I was sure I read about it on several sites.

My thought when I posted this thread was free as in freedom.

Any ideas on the packages I have to remove to make the entire thing free? I know Debian uses IceWeasel to get around the Firefox issue.

Hi,
The links you provided speak of the API and tainted drivers. This is in reference to the use of closed source binary drivers. The API will allow the use of a binary driver with the Linux Kernel. The second link just speaks of binary drivers that cause a problem as being tainted and how a user should handle the issue.

Look at NDISWRAPPER and how we get some hardware to work using M$ drivers for the Linux kernel.

Like I said, xv (which I use quite often) certainly is not opensource, probably some others too. HPLIP is opensource, so I reed: http://hplip.sourceforge.net/about.html
The Debian way of handling FF/IceWeasel is "much ado about nothing", IMHO.

@ Onebuck: thanks for pointing that out.

Funny thing is: the forum software on LinuxQuestions.org is not open source either. :)

Xv is definitely closed-source, but I think most people could safely remove it now that there are suitable alternatives, even installed in Slackware by default. ImageMagick does most of what Xv can do (if you're just using Xv to display pictures and nothing else you can just use `display pic.jpg` instead of `xv pic.jpg`, for example. If you use Xv for minimal editing activity, you could use the conversion features of imagemagick or just use the GIMP for more advanced editing). However, I don't think it'll be removed from Slackware at any time soon just because people have gotten used to it and would probably complain if it was removed -- and since it's not the world's most difficult thing to compile, and there's little development if any as far as I know, so the build script wouldn't have to change much.

Hi,

Slackware 12.1 'COPYRIGHT.TXT' is a good reference for software included as too type of license.

It is my understanding that the PINE mail client is also non-Free since version 3.9.2.