Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:11:55
Message-Id: 8b4c83ad0912280511w2c728525q7f7e07a956d405f2@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo by "Rémi Cardona"
1 On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Rémi Cardona <remi@g.o> wrote:
2 > Le 28/12/2009 06:36, Vincent Launchbury a écrit :
3 >> 1) Not all of the licenses are completely accurate. For example, the
4 >> Linux kernels are listed as soley GPL-2, yet they contain blobs of
5 >> non-free firmware.
6 >
7 > Indeed, that's a very good point. And that's precisely why I was against
8 > ACCEPT_LICENSE to begin with.
9 >
10 > It's a good idea on paper, but it's just not feasible at a large scale
11 > (like portage) without a proper _team_ of devoted people sifting through
12 > code and license blobs to make it useful. I'm also pretty sure a couple
13 > lawyers would be needed as well.
14 >
15
16 I think we can simply follow debian and fedora's lead on this. They
17 have the lawyers, and being in the same bowl as them would be a good
18 idea if any problems ever crop up. One area where we're in a fishy
19 situation (distinct from debian/fedora) is our distribution of isos
20 and stages without the adjoining sources[1]. This situation always
21 makes me queasy. But I'm digressing here...
22
23 > Unless people dedicate time and effort, ACCEPT_LICENSE is useless.
24 >
25
26 Not entirely useless, and maintainers can, and should, spend time
27 making sure ACCEPT_LICENSE is complete and accurate.
28
29 > [snip]
30 >
31 > The rest of your points are indeed all valid as well.
32 >
33 > I can only encourage you to either work with individual developers to
34 > get ebuilds fixed (USE=bindist or whatever) or join our ranks to fix
35 > this yourself if you really want a "pure" Free Gentoo.
36 >
37
38 ++ on this. We're a direct-to-users distro; we empower you and give
39 you the means to empower yourself. We probably have the easiest and
40 most direct way to get recruited (although it's strenous on the
41 recruiters side ;).
42
43
44 1. Actually, I was thinking we could take the result at the end of
45 src_prepare, tarball it up, do it for all the packages we have in the
46 iso, tar up all *those* and serve the end result up too.
47
48 --
49 ~Nirbheek Chauhan
50
51 Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo Peter Volkov <pva@g.o>