Free Software Directory:UserNotices
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers defines the term feature in IEEE 829 as "A distinguishing characteristic of a software item (e.g., performance, portability, or functionality)". UserNotices 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.
Team Captain: David Hedlund
The pages of applications which have UserNotices 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. Useful related pages: Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) and software categories, Free Software Directory:Requirements.
- Listed software tagged with UserNotice: 20
- Alphabetic list
Contents
Anti-features
Nonfree
Bait and surrender
Avoid the term freemium.
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 |
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 |
Nonfree documentation
One of the following:
- Primary documentation is not freely licensed
- The primary documentation or important related resources (e.g. forum, news), require running nonfree code (e.g. nonfree javascript).
0 listed:
Superseded
The software is no longer maintained and has been superseded by another program based on it.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 |
Tiered software
- LibreOffice: LanguageTool is an optional grammar and spelling checker integrated into LibreOffice 7.4 and above, which raises privacy concerns because it sends user text to remote servers for processing. Although LanguageTool is not included in the LibreOffice package for free distributions, it is available in many non-free distributions. Also, LanguageTool is not enabled by default.
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) |
DRM
0 listed:
Tethering
We can verify whether the published software is free. The service is likely all free, so saying it is non-free is incorrect. It is more of a philosophical problem where we cannot make a judgement on services being free or not free.
5 listed:
| Name | |
|---|---|
| IVPN | |
| Mozilla VPN | |
| Mullvad VPN | |
| NordVPN | |
| Private Internet Access |
Tracking
This UserNotice 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 |
Non-features
Software titles with words to avoid
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 issue is less problematic compared to the others so it displayed less prominently in yellow.
"Linux System"
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.
5 listed:
| License | Version identifier | Version date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circus Linux | GPLv2 | ||
| Doc-linux-fr | PublicDomain GFDL GPLv2orlater GPLv2 GPLv1orlater BSD 4Clause | ||
| Linux-Distribution | Perl | ||
| Linux-Distribution-Packages | Other | ||
| Linux-dash | Expat |
Search the FSD for linux
See also
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the page “GNU Free Documentation License”.
The copyright and license notices on this page only apply to the text on this page. Any software or copyright-licenses or other similar notices described in this text has its own copyright notice and license, which can usually be found in the distribution or license text itself.