[gentoo-dev] Re: Proposal: Social Contract change & What is "Gentoo" ?

[Duncan]

Sven Vermeulen posted <20040901073242.GA8228@g.o>, excerpted below,
 on Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:32:42 +0200:

> You are able to find the draft at
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/contract.html. Comments are, as usual,
> appreciated. Please give it a good read, it's not a lenghty document but
> rather important one.

Important, indeed.  The reason I'm here and not elsewhere is because of
the social contract and philosophy.  I'd read the usual stuff in LWN and
the various other press about build-from-source and all that, but when I
started looking seriously at Gentoo, the Gentoo approach to its
relationship with the community and whether and under what licenses it
released its code, were the FIRST things I actually checked out.  I cannot
and will not support proprietary or semi-proprietary work, or I wouldn't
have troubled myself jumping from MS after a decade there when I saw the
light, and I would have looked elsewhere or stayed with Mandrake if I
wasn't fully comfortable with Gentoo.

FWIW, when I mentioned my interest in one of the newsgroups I frequent,
someone mentioned the fork.  I looked it up, and found it highly ironic
all the accusations leveled at Gentoo, when the original choice of the GPL
license was what made the fork possible in the first place, and taking
Gentoo proprietary as was alleged to be part of the secret plan, extremely
problematic if not impossible altogether.  The contrast between those
accusations and reality only emphasized the value of Gentoo and its chosen
philosophy.

As for the draft..  the wording of the "Gentoo" definition looks a bit
shaky to me.  It could be taken to lay claim to /all/ the "intellectual
property" produced by Gentoo developers in the two given areas.  I'm sure
many are familiar with existing corporate practice to this effect.  Thus,
an additional clause "as they may choose to contribute it to the Gentoo
and larger open source community" might be in order.

Gentoo is the collection of:

* free knowledge such as documentation and metadata about concepts/domains
relevant to operating systems and their components, created by Gentoo
developers "as they may choose to contribute it to the Gentoo and
larger open source community"

* free software developed by Gentoo Developers "as they may choose to
contribute that too, to the Gentoo and larger open source
community"

... or something to that effect, anyway... the idea being that they may
have OTHER projects they are involved with, particularly as the
developers are volunteers and would be /expected/ to have other jobs and 
commitments, and Gentoo isn't going to demand that all THAT work ALSO be
made available to Gentoo.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list