[gentoo-dev] "Commercial" software in portage

[Chris Gianelloni]

I had a nice little discussion with someone today about commercial
software in portage.  His basic complaint was that there's no way to
distinguish what software is commercial and what is not.  The licenses
are not always apparent in these things.  Anyway, I had originally
thought this to be something for metadata.xml, and if it is decided that
is still the best place for it, then I'm all for it, but I'd like to
present an alternate proposal.

We could add a license, called "commercial" into the tree.  This license
would look like the following.

"This is a license created by Gentoo to indicate that a package is of a
commercial nature.  The reasoning behind this is so users are aware that
a package might not be in a 100% functional state without some form of
user interaction, such as the addition of data files or a CD key after
installation.

This package, or portions of this package, fall under one or more
commercial licenses and is not free."

Basically, we just add "commercial" to LICENSE in the ebuild, and (if
wanted or necessary) add "check_license $licese_required_to_be_accepted"
to pkg_setup on the ebuild.  While this will break completely
interactive ebuilds until GLEP23 is fully implemented, a user can add
the license to make.conf in an ACCEPT_LICENSE variable, to keep portage
from asking again.  This means when a user does an "emerge -S" they will
see the nice little "commercial" listed under licenses, which will
hopefully trigger to them that this package is not free.  Another
possible addition is a "commercial-free" license, which would cover
things like America's Army and Enemy Territory (I'm sure there are
others, but I know of these two) that are free for users to use, but are
still commercial software.

This would require us to make some modifications to a few ebuilds,
though I know that most of the ebuilds using check_license are
maintained by me.  I'm willing to make all necessary changes in the tree
for this to be seamless for our users.  The only packages which will
interactively ask the user to accept a license are the ones that do so
currently.

So now I ask, can anyone think of a reason not to do this, or a better
way to go about it?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux