This is a think that just would cripple and not benefit anyone. smtube is free software. The service it is using is probably nonfree but than again would browser be considered nonfree because we can access YouTube with it? @mladen.pejakovic just point again to FSF list if this is considered by them nonfree as I think this would actually require a debate as software in usage here is free software

smtube isn't removed in Trisquel (http://packages.trisquel.info/belenos/smtube), and yes, it's free. But for PureOS as a privacy/security focused OS it would be better to drop this (IMHO, see again: http://tonvid.com/privacy-policy.php). Besides, smplayer already can play YouTube videos by default (by using mpv as a backend).

Indeed, I will take this into consideration and into company debate.

for the record: mpv uses youtube-dl for accessing Youtube and other online streaming services,

smtube is an interactive Youtube browser - that is different from smplayer/mpv/youtube-dl which only supports feeding an explicit already known Youtube URL.

possible alternatives to smtube are minitube and (for console only, and therefore quite likely limited to audio) mps-youtube

funny, I am the maintainer for mps-youtube and while it is cli based, it can show video as well (defaults to mpv for such usage)

it seems the version of smtube currently in Debian does *not* rely on tonvid.com. A likely related issue to that is https://bugs.debian.org/797500