Written in Perl | Operating system | |
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Original author(s) Developer(s) Bdale Garbee
Rogério Brito Stable release 1.16 / August 26, 2011; 5 years ago (2011-08-26) License GNU General Public License | ||
vrms (Virtual Richard M. Stallman) is a program that analyzes the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and reports all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed. Software gets placed in the non-free tree when it is agreed not to be too problematic for Debian to distribute but does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines and therefore cannot be included in their official distribution. For each program from "non-free" installed, vrms displays an explanation of why it is non-free, if one is available.
Contents
This explanation is usually from a list included in the vrms package itself, but other packages can provide additional lists of explanations too.
History
Vrms was written by Bdale Garbee and Bill Geddes for the Debian GNU/Linux system, in response to an open discussion with Richard Stallman about the issues surrounding the availability/desirability of the "non-free" package tree in Debian. Yet the package is somewhat controversial because, while it contains Stallman's initials, it still follows Debian's definitions of free rather than that of the GNU project. The Free Software Foundation lists vrms among packages that don't respect its Free System Distribution Guidelines.
In 2005, Rogério Brito, motivated to improve the status of the package status, looked at and fixed some long outstanding bugs reported in Debian's Bug Tracking System, and, shortly afterwards, the project moved to a more distributed and cooperative development with a mailing list being created and with the source code being put in a Subversion version control system hosted by Alioth's Debian server.
Example
Output of vrms in a system with Sun Java, unrar and VMware Player installed:
Non-free packages installed on localhost sun-java5-bin Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 sun-java5-demo Sun Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK) 5.0 demos and examp sun-java5-jdk Sun Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK) 5.0 sun-java5-jre Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 unrar Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version) Reason: Modifications problematic vmware-player Free virtual machine player from VMware vmware-player-kernel-modu vmware-player modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.17) 7 non-free packages, 0.6% of 1218 installed packages.