Re: [gentoo-dev] "Commercial" software in portage

[Cory Visi]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 11:54:25AM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 00:37 +0900, Georgi Georgiev wrote:
> > maillog: 22/09/2005-09:28:53(-0400): Chris Gianelloni types
> > > I thought I had made it fairly clear, but I can elaborate.
> > >
> > > "commercial" would be anything that requires a purchase to use.  This
> > > could be anything from specific media (such as most games) to a CD key
> > > or license file.
> > >
> > > The basic idea is to put in a marker to let people know that "This won't
> > > work without you spending money."
> > >
> > > This isn't a marker of whether something is proprietary, but rather a
> > > marker of whether something works out of the box.  Sun's JDK, while it
> > > could be argued whether it would be "commercial" or not, does work out
> > > of the box, once you fetch the sources.  You don't have to purchase it.
> >
> > So, how do you treat icc? It requires a license key, but you can get the
> > key for free after registering. The package does not cost money and does
> > not work out of the box.
>
> Is that a full license or some kind of demo ala VMWare Workstation?
>
> Oh yeah, and I don't maintain icc, so that would really be up to the
> maintainers, but *I* would probably put commercial on it.


Maybe "commercial" is just the wrong word. The way I understand the 
concept is to let users know that they have to take a step outside of 
portage (that's not just fetching the download) to get a package to work. 
I think this is a good idea. We just need to call it something that 
doesn't cause endless confusion.

On a related note, keeping with the philosophy here, I would say that 
Opera does not qualify for this new flag, because it works out of the 
box. Even if it has ads, it still works. However, Opera is obviously 
commercial, so this is another reason to perhaps think up another name 
for the flag.

-Cory
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