Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: joining the Software Freedom Conservancy

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 17:28 -0700, Josh Saddler wrote:
> Ryan Hill wrote:
> > Marius Mauch wrote:
> >> While I think this would be an excellent move, there are a few topics
> >> that concern me a bit:
> >> 1) just to be sure, did someone check the transfer agreement between the
> >> Foundation and the old Gentoo, Inc for potential problems?
> >> 2) what would this mean for our copyright situation? In detail:
> >> a) who would (legally) own the copyright?
> >> b) what would (in theory) be involved if we'd want to enforce/change
> >> the license?
> >> c) if the copyright were owned by the Conservancy, would we have to
> >> change our copyright headers (in existing and/or new files)?
> >
> > It might be worth noting that it appears that Gentoo would be the first
> > distribution to join.  I'd be interested in knowing if the SFC considers
> > distributing closed-source or proprietary software (nero, ati/nvidia
> > drivers, vmware) to be "producing non-free software (as per the
> > Conservancy's charitable purpose)" as mentioned in section 2(b) of their
> > notes.  Paragraph 2(a) seems to prohibit it.
> >
> >> a. The Project Will Be Free Software.  The Conservancy and the Project agree that
> >>    any software distributed by the Project will be distributed solely as Free Software.
> >
> > If that's not a problem I think this is a great idea.
>
> We don't "distribute" those, do we? A look at their ebuilds shows that
> those are just downloaded from upstream, not from Gentoo mirrors. Well,
> except for Nero.
>
> At least we aren't the creators of it!
>
> Does that document you mention define what "Free Software" is? nvidia
> drivers are free to download, install, use, in the sense that they don't
> cost anything. Bah, legal hassle!

It doesn't matter, since the SFC has already said they would welcome us.
I think Grant did a quick "informal" LICENSE scan and determined that
like 95% of the tree was GPL-licensed.  That high of a percentage was
enough for the SFC, along with our informal policy of preferring OSS
over proprietary.  After all, we could still be offering XFree86, but
chose to go with the more "open" of the two and focus all of our
energies there.  We've also seen quite a few external drivers get
removed over the years after the open replacements got good enough to
replace the proprietary drivers.  I'm sure many of you can come up with
your own examples of this.  The point was that we *do* push free
software, and our products are free software and not proprietary.  The
only real problem that I have here is it limits our ability to ever have
a non-free fork, such as an enterprise fork, run by us, without leaving
the SFC.  Of course, we're nowhere near that point now, so it shouldn't
be a primary concern, especially considering that we can leave the SFC
of our own volition at any time, and the SFC will even help us set up
ourselves when/if that times comes.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation