[musicale]

Beyond being supremely irritating, nagware is simply not scalable.

Imagine if every utility, library, or driver in a typical Linux distribution took this approach. :(

I encourage Debian et al. to adopt a "no nagware" policy.

[jwilk]

There's something similar in Debian Policy §2.3 (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#cop...):

> Programs whose authors encourage the user to make donations are fine for the main distribution, provided that the authors do not claim that not donating is immoral, unethical, illegal or something similar; in such a case they must go in non-free.

BTW, the nagware code has been removed in Debian unstable:

https://bugs.debian.org/905674

[musicale]

It's about time! In addition to my "it's annoying and simply not scalable" comment, the bug discussion brings up some additional compelling points:

1. It included a click-wrap agreement in violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

2. Fishing for inappropriate citations should not be encouraged, as it compromises the integrity of scholarship.

[mechanical_jane]

I am trying to understand your take. Do you also call Firefox nagware, when it pops up with a dialog box where you can click "Don't show this again"?

To me the dialog box is actually worse, because the program often blocks until you close the dialog box (not 100% sure if that is the case with Firefox).

With GNU Parallel you run 'parallel --citation' once, and you are done. We are talking an effort of 15 seconds or less.

When I install a library I often have to run the install command and it often takes longer than 15 seconds.

Finally, I would like to understand why you do not just use another utility? Would that not solve your issue?

[musicale]

Nagware is irritating and simply not scalable.

At least with web browsers they are user-facing and you only have a few of them to deal with.

I never choose parallel intentionally, but I still encounter the nagware messages in the output of scripts that other people wrote. And disabling the nagware message on my laptop doesn't disable it in a container, in the cloud, etc.. It's very annoying.

Wasting 15 seconds of human time certainly isn't scalable over dozens or hundreds of utilities. And applying the Steve Jobs computation[1], 15 seconds * 1 million users = nearly six months of wasted human lifetime.

Fortunately Debian-unstable seems to have fixed the issue by removing the nag message (which violates the DFSG). With luck this will propagate into mainline and into all of the downstream distributions like Ubuntu.

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt