Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo

[Jeremy Olexa]

Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently emailed the Gentoo PR team, voicing my concerns about the
> amount of non-free software within Gentoo. I got an interesting response
> from Sebastian Pipping, who said that while Gentoo is all about choice,
> including the choice to install non-free software, the project is
> interested in making it easy for people to run a 100% free system,
> should they choose that path.
>
> I found out about the license filtering feature in the dev version of
> portage, and used it to remove all the non-free software from my
> system. However, it wasn't a perfect experience. Based on what Sebastian
> had to say, and my own experience using it, I have a few suggestions.
>
> 1) Not all of the licenses are completely accurate. For example, the
> Linux kernels are listed as soley GPL-2, yet they contain blobs of
> non-free firmware. Perhaps a general-purpose "not-free" license could be
> appended to such packages. This would only affect people who choose to
> use the feature. It could be minused from the FSF-APPROVED group for
> example.
>
> Also relating to this, what is freedist? The package app-text/dos2unix
> lists 'freedist' as its license, and /usr/portage/licenses/freedist says
> only "Freely Distributable". Several other packages do this, and I'm
> sure it's not correct. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the dos2unix
> package is from http://www.thefreecountry.com/tofrodos/, which clearly
> says its GPLv2. Packages like this could be looked into and fixed.

File bugs mate. Licensing is not exactly clear to all users or devs.  As 
can be seen here[1] for dos2unix. It sounds like you care in this area, 
so get involved.

[1]: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177822

-Jeremy

>
> 2) There are no free versions of the kernel in the main tree. The Latin
> American FSF maintains blob-free kernels at
> http://www.linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/releases/. They could
> be added alongside the official vanilla ebuilds.
>
> 3) Some free software packages bring in non-free optional dependencies
> by default. For example, media-gfx/imagemagick brings in
> media-fonts/corefonts. As suggested by Sebastian, a free profile could be
> created, that changes these defaults, to reduce the hassle of
> maintaining a free system. Again, this would only affect users who
> choose to use that profile.
>
> 4) Using something like ACCEPT_LICENSES="-* @FSF-APPROVED" is a good
> start, but its quite a hassle to keep checking all the licenses. One
> annoyance is packages like sys-devel/gcc. gcc has the libgcc license,
> which is just GPLv2+, with some extra permissions granted. Although it's
> important to make such a distinction, these extra freedoms are
> irrelevant to license filtering.
>
> I suppose the only feasible way to fix this would be to expand the
> license groups in /usr/portage/profiles/license_groups. Would it cause
> any problems if they were quite large?
>
> Another option might be to introduce an optional IS_FREE="yes/no" option
> to the ebuild files, which could override the other license settings.
>
> 5) Documentation on how to set up and maintain a fully free system could
> be added.
>
>
> To summarize, my general idea is to fix some licensing issues, introduce
> the libre kernels and have a 100% free profile that would create the
> least possible amount of hassle for anyone using it. This in turn would
> make Gentoo more accessible to the free software community, without
> affecting people that don't use the profile.
>
> This is my first post here, so I apologize if it's misdirected. I'm not
> sure if I'd really be able to help much on the technical side, but if
> this garners any cooperation, I'll gladly help out with anything I can.
> If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful.
>
> Kind Regards,
> Vincent Launchbury.
>
>