.deb install has a proprietary license

I recently tried to download the .deb installation off of the Get Delta Chat - Delta Chat page, only to have my installer tell me that it contains a proprietary license

This naturally worries me, as I was under the impression that deltachat-desktop was protected under the GPL3 license.

I would have liked to build the software from source, but the desktop repository mentions that:

warning This is mostly for development purposes, this won't install/integrate deltachat into your system. So unless you know what you are doing, we recomment to stick to the methods above if possible.

Does anyone know how I could go around fixing this issue?

Apologies if I haven’t formatted my topic appropriately, this is my first post here.

Desktop is licensed under GPL3, that is correct.

Looks like this is a bug of Gnome Software: Licence 'unknown' instead of 'privative' for .deb packages (#875) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-software · GitLab
Maybe also a bug in electron builder (program we use to package deltachat desktop) builded .deb shows wrong license informations · Issue #4270 · electron-userland/electron-builder · GitHub

dpkg-deb --info ./deltachat-desktop.deb shows the correct license so you don’t need to worry about it in this case.

You can build from source, you should just checkout to the tag of the newest version to get a tested experience. When you want a package you can install, you can package it and then install it. (Steps for packaging)

no worries :smile:
and welcome to the forum

1 Like