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On 20:31 Thu 25 Jul , hasufell wrote: |
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> Gentoo has a social contract [1] which makes a lot of noise about free |
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> software. However our default settings allow to use almost any kind of |
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> non-free license such as "all-rights-reserved". |
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> |
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> While I see nothing wrong with gentoo providing proprietary stuff (and |
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> I have created a lot of such games ebuilds), I think according to our |
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> philsophy and social contract we should make people aware of free |
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> software and because of that also change the default to: |
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> |
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> ACCEPT_LICENSE="@FREE" |
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> |
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> This is only about the _default_. We will have to change the handbook |
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> at "1.d. Licenses" [2] and might also make a news item. |
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|
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Gentoo has been and should remain a pragmatic distribution rather than |
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promoting a specific licensing philosophy to our users. We've always |
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focused on providing *reasonable* rather than *restrictive* or *minimal* |
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defaults, in the interest of keeping the barrier to entry lower and |
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lessening the effort required to set up a functional Gentoo |
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installation. |
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|
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I don't see any conflict between requiring that our system packages be |
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free software and providing the pragmatic experience that we also |
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promise to our users in our philosophy: |
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"Put another way, the Gentoo philosophy is to create better tools. When a |
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tool is doing its job perfectly, you might not even be very aware of its |
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presence, because it does not interfere and make its presence known, nor |
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does it force you to interact with it when you don't want it to. The |
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tool serves the user rather than the user serving the tool." |
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|
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-- |
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Thanks, |
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Donnie |
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|
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Donnie Berkholz |
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Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com> |
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Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/> |
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