Re: [gentoo-project] What should the default acceptable licenses be?

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 12:53 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
>
> 1) Do the users not currently have a choice today? (e.g. do we need to populate the @nonfree license set?)

Since licenses are excluded by default I'm not sure if a non-free
explicit set helps much, but there is an EULA license group.

> I think if there isn't a @free-only (or -@nonfree) item we should do the work to make that possible (so ensure 1 is implemented.)

We have plenty of options here:
FREE-SOFTWARE
FREE
BINARY-REDISTRIBUTABLE
GPL-COMPATIBLE
FSF-APPROVED
OSI-APPROVED
MISC-FREE

(Just a selection.)

Everything is in profiles/license_groups

>  I think a @free default fits right into the Gentoo Social Contract and while I oppose it on a personal basis (because I think the result harms users) I do support it on an organizational basis.

Not depending on non-free software sounds nice in principle until you
start talking about all those little things that make physical
hardware actually work.  If it were a practical option I'd be all for
it.  Otherwise this is a choice that really only exists on paper.

For seasoned users it isn't that big a deal since we mostly have our
own make.conf files and so on.  I just am concerned it will be hard
for users.

What will we put in the handbook?  Will we want to encourage them to
use a config that we know will often not work, or will we be up-front
that our defaults break most of the time in the real world?  If we
have a default that often causes problems we should probably be pretty
up-front about that in the handbook so that users don't have to go to
#gentoo when their system breaks to find out that nobody actually
follows the official docs/defaults.

Honestly, though, Gentoo has for its entire history been about
practical defaults, and not about FSF/OSI purity.  We certainly try
not to depend on non-free software as we say in our social contract,
but these issues are all way upstream of Gentoo.  IMO we ought to be
finding a practical balance here and not be driven entirely by
ideology.  Personally I'm a pretty big FSF fan in general, but I think
a distro needs to be practical first, with the option for purity, but
of course complying with redistribution restrictions.

-- 
Rich