Arch does not have official FOSS only repo. And IIRC, that is by design
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Do you know why? Would not be hard to simply filter by license.
Well, because Arch tries to be simple and pragmatic. The way the official repo is organized speaks volumes about its philosophy. ~~Just read their FAQs~~
My bad, not FAQs, but their explanation page
I didn't see anything in that wiki that suggests why a simple check when installing a piece of software on whether it's license conflicts with a license you don't want to install isn't simple and pragmatic. Other distros like Gentoo do this.
Because it adds something that is not essential, so it is not "simple". If package A depends on package B with an incompatible license then it needs to provide a means to specify alternate packages. Arch follows upstream with best effort possible, so changing dependency could be seen as breaking that. However, pacman already supports choosing alternate packages during installation so technically they could add it, but how many percentage of users are needing that convenience? Not to mention the arch team will need to maintain said list of alternatives for every dependencies. If you want, you can add it yourself via pacman hook to prevent you from accidentally installing non free software, or write a wrapper for pacman, or use other distro like Parabola.
You might be interested in Parabola, an Arch-based FOSS-only distribution. If you don't want to switch to a whole new distribution, maybe you can use its repos from Arch (not that I've heard of anyone trying that).
It seems like there is not enough maintenance going on there. Looks like I'll try Debian...
Debian is great and so is arch. Parabola is still updated. I’ll try it if you care about pure FOSS. Debian has non open source drivers in installation (i think). Happened after bookworm. The GNU website has distro a that are purely FOSS.