HA!

"Non-commercial only."

BUT, this does not demonstrate proprietary software when the software is free for real like Slackware.

Patrick Volkerding gives his work for free, as gift to everyone, he does not sell Slackware.

OK, dear @qweased I will explain you what happens for real...

Your Dear Leader from FSF cannot sleep because CLANG and MESON, and all those things which starts to be adopted by the Linux distributions.

He dreamed of being El Lider Maximo of Open Source, but Linus Torvalds laughs in his face for GPL3, his Hurd kernel demonstrated to be good for nothing, his flag-ship product: GCC will sunk like the Titanic when the CLANG will be able to compile well the Linux kernel, and who still use AUTOMAKE?

That's WHY he cannot sleep, seeing his ship going in the waters. It is clear that in the near future the Linux community will kiss goodbye this radical commie, just like they done with XFree86.

And to justify his multi-million foundation, he needs followers. He needs someone to still use his software. For this happens those thingies.

Well, I will wait with a pack of cold beers the day when Slackware will switch completely to CLANG, MESON, and so on.

For sample: Jesus, Bush-junior, and... The Shredder! (TMNT)
This is a really big list. And is quote - no bad, by default. :-) Its implementation is different every where. Once again I ask you, do not mix everything into one heap.

FSF is not equal talibs; FSF is not equal "real fucked-in-head commies", and FSF is not equal The Shredder! (TMNT)
RMS as Jesus, no not virtual.

MESON - is bad idea. Really. This not unix-way.

RMS believes he's El Lider Maximo like Fidel Castro.

I cannot believe what radicalism projects this guy.

Linux is not UNIX, it is UNIX-like, for example "any device is a file".

Ugu, and systemd -the only true initialization system. :-D :-D :-D

In fact, I saw communism from the side with which it is better not to see anyone. I say - not all leftists are equally "left". And in general, it is an outdated model of division on the left and right. Universe live into 4x-dimension. Or more (See works of Stephen Hawking for more details). :-)

Within the Freenix forum, we use the FSF's definition of "free software". I am well aware that "free software" is an ambiguous term within the Slackware forum (free as in beer and all that), so I try not to use this term here. Instead I use the term "libre software" to refer to the software that respects users' freedoms to distribute modified copies. This is still FSF's definition or something very similar to it, but using a less ambiguous term. I cannot help with you being insulted by a simple admission of fact: Slackware is not fully libre. Get over it. I am not having an argument over semantics. And I bet you can't provide a single reference which would describe Slackware as "libre software". Who or what in EU uses the words "libre software" to include sourceless blobs with all rights reserved? Can you cite a single reference?

That was not always the case. He used to distribute blobs alongside the source, within the same tarballs and git trees. I am checking right now, and it looks like he fixed that At any rate, this is moot, because Slackware users get something different: something with blobs.

Malware is a generic term for software which is somehow malicious. We can disagree on whether a particular feature/license is malicious, and we can disagree on the intensity of the malice, but I think I can convince you that all proprietary software (more precisely, all software which takes away users' right to distribute modified copies) should be regarded as malicious.

Closed source software is malicious in the same way as a closed source contract is malicious. I have a standard contract, will you sign it? It says that

(a) I have to pay you 1000 US dollars.

(b) You have to provide the services listed in item (c), which is in escrow, and will be published after you sign the contract.

(c) ???

(d) If you breach the contract, you have to pay me 10000 US dollars.

If we apply your logic, you will sign this, right? Let me know and I will have it mailed, as long as your jurisdiction will enforce it. This contract is clearly beneficial to you, since you get $1000 dollars, and there is zero direct evidence that item (c) is malicious. Unlike you, though, I wouldn't sign it, because I have mountains of indirect evidence for (c) being malicious, even though just plain common sense would be enough to smell a turd in this case. Similarly, I loath using closed source software even when I lack direct evidence of malicious functionality, because of the preponderance of circumstantial evidence. I regard it as malicious, and I expect its makers to prove it's not malicious by opening the source code.

OK, let's have another go at it, without analogies this time. Would you run a binary if I emailed it to you? I could claim it solve some of your problems. May be I could even prove to you, by citing use cases, that it solved other people's problems. You can't prove it's malicious, so you will run it? And if you don't run, don't you essentially regard it as highly likely to be malicious? And if so, what makes it different from all the other commercial blobs you are willing to run? Of course, if you run something like Adobe flash, you point at the vendor at say: here's a big and respectable vendor, surely they won't distribute malware, for the fear of bad PR. And you know what? 25 years ago I would agree with you. When we were playing DOS games, many of them probably were without malicious features (although even then some had copy protection, which is clearly malicious from the user's point of view). And the climate was different, whereas leaks involving malware could bury a vendor's reputation. But this clearly hasn't been the case in decades. Big "respectable" vendors get caught with both hands in the cookie jar all the time, and they escape all liability as a rule. Is anyone seriously assuming zero malicious functionality in a closed source blob these days? You want an example of something actually insulting to an average person's intelligence? Try a closed source software vendor issuing a closed source "patch" for what looks like a bonified backdoor. If anything, I am orders of magnitude less suspicious than Micro$oft or gOogle, because they have quite a track record of pushing malicious features on their users, and I don't.

Finally, a few words about the sourced software which is not libre, also included in Slackware. Even that is malicious, in my opinion, although the risk factor is very small, and the malicious part is in the license, not in the code. My reasoning is, if we as a community do not have the right to distribute a bug fix, then we have a liability on our hands, and the copyright holder can abuse us in a variety of ways. And again, to be very clear, it's not that it will be malicious some time in the possible future... It's malicious today, because it comes with a malicious license today.

I am beginning to suspect you are trolling me. Why won't you read the FreeSlack documentation before you make false claims? Unless, of course, you are using the word "proprietary" in some weird sense as well, there are many proprietary packages in Slackware besides xv, and identifying them all was how FreeSlack got its start.

I understand you are upset at my choice of words, but I don't want to keep arguing about it. I believe it's enough if we just make clear how we use our terminology. I can see you get offended when people use words like "free", "nonfree", and "libre" in a rather common, well described way, just because you think they mean something else. I also totally understand your personal software malice threshold is in a different place, and I don't want to argue about that either. I am happy just explaining how this kind of software hurts the users, and I call it malicious whenever I can trace this hurtful function to the software author's intent to abuse the users. Note that I said originally, malicious software of a specific type. You don't seem to consider this type of behavior malicious, but we do, and so do our users, so can we just put the semantic argument to rest?

I hope you realize I hold Slackware in the highest regard among the GNU+Linux distributions, and all we do at Freenix is we try to contribute to Slackware project and community in a way that makes it accessible to a broader user base. We are appealing to users who would not normally use Slackware because they would like to avoid all non-libre software. We officially don't care why they need that. We are sure some of them are freedom fighters, and others are privacy freaks, like yours truly. None of this matters to us. We are simply producing an OS and a software compilation with a well-defined policy concerning licensing and behavior towards users.

P.S. Took me a while to write this, and reading through the thread now, I can see that Darth Vader went off the rails, what with personal insults and all. Darth, I really don't feel like we are making any good progress in this forum when we equate FSF with communists, and communists with taliban (??), so if you want me to keep feeding you, make an account here: https://freenix.net/forum/index.php

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I didn't include that portion about the MEs as a disagreement. I actually agree with you that they can be considered malware. It was just a common thing you continually reference, so I felt it was worth it to mention it directly

Non-commercial use would also mean that people should not be using that software to get a commercial advantage or monetary compensation. Restrictive licenses preventing you from using the software in certain situations, preventing modification, preventing distribution does not conform to the FSF's definition of F(L)OSS, or libre software. I personally have no problems using them, and I'm not using Slackware in business setting, so I'm not running into any potential legal issues, but I can understand why some may not be interested in having that software installed.

Pat obviously doesn't design Slackware for a specific usage (desktop, SOHO, business, or server), so there's no reason he can't include non-commercial use software, but if a user is using Slackware in a business environment, they shouldn't be using non-commercial only software (although, I'm sure there's plenty of people who will ignore the licenses and do what they want anyway, but that's not what this is about).

Linuxquestions.org is a forum catering to every (potential) Linux user, fostering the sharing of knowledge and inviting open discussions. So your demeanor should match that. Please do not move forward posting in languages other than English.

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This is word independenced from language. :-D

And how is malicious a SlackBuild like extra/google-chrome/google-chrome.SlackBuild which download no thing, and install no thing, contrary with your claims.

It just repackage a specific Debian package (if available) to a tarball compatible with Slackware.

Also, it is a Bash script with a clear MIT license, which guarantee the four freedoms of FSF, according with https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

I see no conflict with:

I will make accent of freedom 0, "the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose", then its removal because hypothetically case that can help the user to repackage and install proprietary software is moot. Repackaging a binary package does not guarantee also the its installation. Could be done for a friend.

The user should have the freedom to run a "libre software" for any purpose, right?

Always:

This no friend for you. Never.

Excuse me? And who are you to decide what's the right purpose for me?

According with FSF's https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html I should have the freedom to run a "libre software" for any purpose.

Also this SlackBuild is clearly "libre software" and I do not said that I have the intention to run Google Chrome, just running the script.

1 members found this post helpful.

You can still have your freedom to run that program, but I figure they remove it because there are people who don't want nothing to do with it.
There's absolutely nothing preventing you to download run that repack locally, is there?

1 members found this post helpful.