VRMS-RPM(1)

📦
version 2.4 · 3 versions
, in epel 10, fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 NAME 💖

vrms-rpm — the little program that snitches on your non-free software, bestie. It's literally "report of installed non-free software" and it's giving auditor energy.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

vrms-rpm [OPTION] ...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so, real talk: this is a clone of the OG vrms ("virtual Richard M. Stallman") program from Debian GNU/Linux, and the whole point of making it was to bring that iconic idea over to RPM-based GNU/Linux distros. Slay.

So what does it do? It goes through your list of currently installed RPM packages and reports any non-free ones it finds to stdout. And how does it decide if something is free or non-free? Based on the Fedora Project licensing guidelines, periodt.

Now, Fedora / CentOS girlies using extra repos like RPM Fusion might notice something sus: not every package from a non-official repo gets marked non-free. Why? Because the call is made based on the package licence, like we said. There are a bunch of reasons a package might not have made it into the official Fedora / CentOS repo that have nothing to do with licensing — software patents, export restrictions, that whole thing.

Richard Stallman has been, for years, the most prominent and most vocal figure in the Free Software movement, and he is relentlessly reminding us about software ethics. And like Richard, we believe users deserve an easy way to know whether the software running on their systems is non-free. This program is our attempt to fulfil that need. 🫶

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • --ascii — shows off some rms ASCII-art when zero non-free packages are found, or when non-free packages make up 10% or more of the total. Iconic either way.
  • --colour <auto, never, always> — controls whether terminal escape sequences get used to colourize the output. Default is auto, which means colour output when you're writing to a terminal, but no colour when writing to a file or a pipe. Very considerate of it ngl.
  • --describe — when it's listing packages, it also throws in the package summaries (aka the short descriptions).
  • --evra <auto, never, always> — prints the packages' epoch:version-release.arch alongside their names. Default is auto, which only does this when it finds multiple packages with the same name. Cute.
  • --explain — when listing packages, it shows licences, as a way of justifying the free / non-free classification.
  • --format <text, json, json-pretty> — the output format to use. Pick your fighter:
    • text — human-readable text format. This is the default.
    • json — compact JSON output. Mainly intended for consumption by other programs.
    • json-pretty — same as above, but with newlines and tab-indentation in the output so it's more human-readable.

Heads up: all of the formats are affected by the --describe, --evra and --explain options.

  • --grammar <loose, spdx-strict, spdx-lenient> — sets the grammar rules used when parsing the license strings.
    • loose — an informal, loose grammar. This is the behaviour used by vrms-rpm v2.2 and earlier.
    • spdx-strict — employs the SPDX License Expression rules.
    • spdx-lenient — same as above, but relaxes some rules around case sensitivity and whitespace.

The default value is spdx-lenient.

  • --help — displays a short help on program usage and exits.
  • --image — like --ascii, except it displays an image using terminal escape sequences and Unicode half-height blocks. Aesthetic ✨
  • --licence-list <FILE> — specifies the list of good licences used for classifying packages. FILE can be a path to a file on disk, or one of the bundled licence lists:
    • fedora
    • spdx-fsf-and-osi
    • spdx-fsf-or-osi
    • spdx-only-fsf
    • spdx-only-osi
    • suse
    • tweaked

The default value is fedora.

  • --list <none, free, nonfree, all> — apart from displaying the total number of free and non-free packages, this also lists packages by name. The default value for this option is nonfree.
  • --version — displays version information and exits.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

👑 LICENCE 👑

This program itself is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. Free software staying free, as it should. 💜

🌸 AUTHOR 🌸

Written in early 2017 by suve. Respect the icon who did this fr fr.

okay that's the whole page bestie, mwah 💅✨

this was vrms-rpm(1) from the General Commands Manual, dated 2025-06-24 — now go check what's lurking in your package list 🦋

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