Freedom issue #2548
[unarchiver] Might be non‐free software
0%
Description
It looks like The Unarchiver is now non‐free software. At least Wikipedia says so.
History
Updated by Anonymous about 1 year ago
Updated by freemor about 1 year ago
Interesting.
As I do not see the source from which the package is compiled. And since that source carries an
GPL 2.1 License.txt
So either that EULA applies to only that binaries available at the referrenced site.
(My reading of the situation) or it was a careless use of a boiler plate EULA not realizing the
conflict.
I'm not a licensing wonk so I don't fully understand how all that would fit together. But the
source is not pulled from the site with the ELUA and thus may be Exempt.
Updated by freemor about 1 year ago
For reference the surrent source is pulled from:
https://bitbucket.org/kosovan/theunarchiver/get/unar1.10.1.tar.gz
Updated by eschwartz about 1 year ago
"This software used to be free software, but isn't free anymore" is such an oxymoronic concept. This seems like a non-issue to me.
Any current or future releases of the proprietary freeware aren't being released as non-free source code as far as I can tell, so at worst this would be a rationale to fork the last GPLed code and carry on the torch yourself. Do you know anyone who is interested?
Updated by bill-auger about 1 year ago
im not sure that unarchiver is needed - it was added to replace
unar, which was itself a replacement for unrar - i have heard
that bsd-tar can also open rar archives - if the only reason to
fork the project is so that parabola users can open rar archives;
then it may not be necessary
i.e. does this program do anything that other programs can not?
Updated by eschwartz about 1 year ago
What precisely did you add? It's in [community] and synced from archlinux.
You should ask whether you have any reason to explicitly blacklist it. Other than the website pointing to some commercial continuation.
Updated by bill-auger about 1 year ago
before arch added 'unarchiver', there was an 'unar' package in
[libre] that was exactly the same program with a confusingly
different name - after arch added 'unarchiver', the confusing
'unar' was removed
Updated by GNUtoo 12 days ago
As I understand it only the package name is misleading so it probably needs to be fixed.
Wikipedia says that:
The Unarchiver is a proprietary freeware2 data decompression utility [...].
But it also says that:
The corresponding command line utilities unar and lsar is free (libre) software licensed under the LGPL6 run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.[7]
So both aren't incompatible. We just need to make sure that the command line utilities are indeed free software and check from time to time if it's still the case, and if not probably keep an old package or look for forks or remove it.