Re: [gentoo-dev] Enemy Territory Strikes Back

[Jason Stubbs]

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 22:42, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 October 2003 13:22, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > On Wednesday 08 October 2003 21:22, Dhruba Bandopadhyay wrote:
> > > -- Will this licence check now serve as the default method of handling
> > > EULA's for future licenced games?
> >
> > I'm wondering about this for all software. In my installation and upgrade
> > of Gentoo, I've never seen anything telling me that I have to accept X
> > license to use Y software. If there has been, it has been barely
> > noticable.
> >
> > I think that forcing users to accept licenses is a Good Thing. Once a
> > license is accepted it should not be reconfirmed for every piece of
> > software that falls under it, of course. However, I do think that at a
> > minimum a banner should be shown stating what license a piece of software
> > falls under.
>
> Why is the license important to the average user? The license can't take
> away any rights given to you by law. The only time the average user needs
> to concern themselves with a license is where the license grants them extra
> rights - the most important one concerning gentoo is allowing
> redistribution, which would otherwise by prohibited by copyright law.
> Unless you are running a gentoo mirror, or actually developing for the code
> in question, the license is mostly irrelevant. Besides, there are hundreds
> of licenses in
> /usr/portages/licenses, do you really want to have to click y for every
> single one?

Well, the only time a user needs to concerned with a GPL/LGPL is when 
programming in which case the license is stamped all over the source code. 
But what about the other "hundreds of licenses"? Do any of those limit the 
rights of the user? Even so, I still think it would be a good idea to at 
least have a banner stating what license the user is assumed to have accepted 
when installing software.

Regards,
Jason

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