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by aritmo 2964 days ago
There is no support for specifying the license yet, so all snap packages appear as "proprietary".

Nothing to look here.

edit: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snap-license-metadata/856/53 Still it is unresolved, they probably use the deprecated licence feature in VLC.

2 comments

You can. The store used to default to "Proprietary" if the developer didn't set it. Now we default to "Unknown" if not specified by the developer.
That is not true. You absolutely can specify a license: https://snapcraft.io/vlc
Off topic: why would someone install VLC over Snap instead of the version from Ubuntu repos?
Because the same snap can run on releases of Ubuntu all the way back to 14.04. 14.04 has VLC 2.1 in the repo. 16.04 LTS has VLC 2.2. The snap store has 3.0.1 in the stable channel, with 4.0 (dev release) in the edge channel. Versions that will never be in the archive of those older releases.

As LTS releases age, the contents of the repo age with them. PPAs are one solution, but they're undiscoverable and not straightforward for new users to setup. Ubuntu has a ton of users who are 'sticky' on old LTS releases.

This enables the VLC developer to have one package that targets millions of users across lots of releases of Ubuntu - and other distros too.

Thanks!