Free Software Directory:Antifeatures

Antifeatures are flags applied to applications to warn of issues that may be undesirable from the user's perspective. Frequently it is behavior that benefits the developer, but that the end user of the software would prefer not to be there.

The pages of applications which have antifeatures include a prominent warning added to the page source.

Discussion is happening on the talk page and mailing list, and Dev for work in progress. Currently we need to merge this page from Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) and software categories.

• Listed software tagged with Antifeature: 26
• Alphabetic list

Adware

Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package that automatically renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author. Some users may happy to support the author in this way, but many would prefer this feature did not exist or was disabled by default.

1 listed:

	Name
Adblock Plus	Adblock Plus (ABP)

Tracking

This Antifeature is applied to software that track you and/or report your activity to somewhere, either without your permission or by default (i.e. you'd have to actively seek out an option to disable it).

2 listed:

	Name
Adblock Plus	Adblock Plus (ABP)
Atom	Atom

Blacklisted

This software is not part of the Free Software Directory except to warn against using it. It is not free software or includes severe malware and many people have been lead to believe it is ethical free software. Once there is no longer a popular misconception about this fact, it's page will be deleted like any software which does not meet the requirements.

0 listed:

Outdated upstream fork

Software that is not based on the latest version of the software it is derived from.

Upstream forks is software that is not a straight fork; instead, they are parallel efforts that works closely with and re-bases in synchronization on the latest base software as the upstream supplier.

0 listed:

Nonfree software support

The software support nonfree software but free software can be used as well. For example, Django supports both PostgreSQL and the proprietary Oracle Database.

0 listed:

Nonfree software promotion

The software recommend another nonfree software.

0 listed:

Bait and surrender

There are two versions of this software, one free and one proprietary. The proprietary version may have more features, but the free software version is still useful. Users should be careful to use only the free software version of the package, to avoid surrendering their freedom.

1 listed:

	License	Version identifier	Version date
LanguageTool	LGPLv2.1orlater

Nonfree documentation

Some software is free but the primary documentation (such as the user guide) and other important resources (e.g. forums, news) are inaccessible or hosted in an exclusive private walled-garden or otherwise for which:

1. reading the documentation requires non-free software to execute,
   • e.g. non-free javascript,
   • e.g. the documentation exists exclusively in a proprietary format for which no free tools exists to read it,
2. the use of free tools to access the documentation is hindered (e.g. text-based browsers like lynx and w3m cannot reach the HTML containing or linking to the user guide [graphical captchas will do this]),
3. or users are denied privacy and compelled to share personal information in order to access the documentation.
   • e.g. users of shared IP addresses (often Tor) have chosen not to be tracked and thus not to share their unique and personal IP address. When servers hosting documentation give these users degraded treatment that is unequal to others, this is an attack on user freedom. By extension it's also an attack on the freedom of all those who would otherwise benefit from cover traffic generated by the repressed user.

0 listed:

Free fork needed!

The developer has betrayed the community by moving to a proprietary license, but people can continue to use and fork the last free version.

1 listed:

	License	Version identifier	Version date
SourceForge	GPLv2orlater

Superseded

The software is no longer maintained and has been superseded by another program based on it.

1 listed:

	License	Version identifier	Version date
QtiPlot	Other

Name uses a word to avoid: "Linux System"

There are a number of words and phrases that we recommend avoiding, or avoiding in certain contexts and usages. Some are ambiguous or misleading; others presuppose a viewpoint that we disagree with, and we hope you disagree with it too.

When considering which free software to use, this anti-feature is less problematic compared to the others so it displayed less prominently in yellow.

Linux is the name of the kernel that Linus Torvalds developed starting in 1991. The operating system in which Linux is used is basically GNU with Linux added. To call the whole system “Linux” is both unfair and confusing. Please call the complete system GNU/Linux, both to give the GNU Project credit and to distinguish the whole system from the kernel alone.

This tag is reserved for obvious and unambiguous references to the GNU/Linux operating system, not the Linux kernel. This unambiguity includes the context of it's homepage and documentation. Note, software which depends on Linux kernel system calls or features usually do not have unambiguous references in their name.

6 listed:

	License	Version identifier	Version date
Circus Linux	GPLv2
Doc-linux-fr	PublicDomain GFDL GPLv2orlater GPLv2 GPLv1orlater BSD 4Clause
Linux-Distribution	Other
Linux-Distribution-Packages	Other
Linux-dash	Expat
V-linux-tools	GPLv3

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