[gentoo-dev] "Gentoo is and will remain Free Software"

[Luke-Jr]

I have been reporting bugs over the past few months regarding licensing 
issues, and inappropriate dependencies on non-Free software. Someone 
recommended I begin a thread on -dev, however, seeing as it may be of greater 
concern in regard to Gentoo's Social Contract.

Reading over the Social Contract, there is a bit of ambiguity about what is 
meant by Gentoo not depending on non-compliant software: does this refer to 
only the base system? A specific desktop or server configuration, or 
configurations? To the maximum extent possible where upstream makes it 
possible?

The most recent issues I have encountered are quite troubling with regard to 
wanting a Free desktop OS: Gentoo now patches KDE to depend on a specific non-
Free font, and Poppler has a hard dependency on the non-Free poppler-data 
(which is only needed for displaying non-embedded non-Latin fonts). Short of 
workarounds via package.provided, these two dependencies make a simple KDE 
desktop impossible on Gentoo without non-Free software. The xorg-x11 7.4 
metapackage also added a number of dependencies on non-Free fonts. There have 
been a number of other similar issues I've encountered over the past year.

To help mitigate this problem, I propose completion of GLEP 23's 
implementation; we already have a working ACCEPT_LICENSE, but the "minimum" 
groups (in particular, @OSI-APPROVED) are as of yet still not defined. By 
enabling more users to filter by approved licenses, I feel these issues will 
get more attention.

Comments? :)

Luke

P.S. I'm subscribed to -nomail, so if your reply is directed specifically to 
me or you want to ensure I read it, feel free to CC.