Subject: Free software and non-free software

From: Olivier Charles Christian Mauclair <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 07:27:27 +0100

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to learn quite a lot about alpine Linux, and I found it
very interesting and very well for speed and clean code. I would personally
consider to use it soon, however I've been looking for answers that have
not been able to find clearly concerning free software and non-free
software. It seems to be like alpine Linux is made of free software mainly,
however there is probably not free software as well. Of course, I'm not
totally against the non-free software because we need them sometimes,
especially for the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth, etc. My questions are simple
but might require a bit of time to answer. First, how do you organize the
separation between non software and free software ? Are you trying to do
like dbn is doing with  main, contrib, nonfree and non-free firmware
branches? Second, how can I know if I have non-free software installed and
if so which ones ? The reasons why I'm asking these questions is because I
would like to contribute to alpine Linux in the future, as I am a computer
science student in the university of Rennes in France, and to be able to
use non-free as less as possible or even ( in a very far future;) ) not at
all. I believe that the Free software is very important and much more
friendly than non-free software. Is there any official statements or
promise from alpine Linux concerning this topic, like the Debian free
software guidelines?

Kind regards,
Olivier Mauclair.

---

From: Olivier Charles Christian Mauclair <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 08:12:22 +0100

Hello everyone,

Kind regards,
Olivier Mauclair.

---

From: Konstantin Kulikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 13:05:01 +0300

Alpine generally doesn't allow non-free packages, things like mongodb,
terraform, zerotier were removed from repos at various points.
linux-firmware is kind of an exception since it's not practical to run
systems without updated cpu microcode or wifi.
To get a list of licenses for installed packages you can use the
command below for example:

cat /lib/apk/db/installed | grep 'L:' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n