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

[Luke-Jr]

On Thursday 12 March 2009 06:53:21 am Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
> Luke-Jr wrote:
> > 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.
>
> How have these bugs been handled?

It can vary. Some of the more trivial things (incorrect LICENSE values) seem 
to be ignored more often than fixed. gsm/sox I believe ended up with 
RESTRICT=mirror in a timely fashon (they are not legally redistributable). The 
KDE team seemed interested in fixing up the font issue, though there was a 
little original hesistation along the lines of whether Gentoo cared if a font 
was not free to sell. The poppler issue seems to be waiting for input/action 
on the printing hurd since March 8th (4 days ago).

> > 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.
>
> I don't know how this has been implemented. I believe they are just lists,
> but I am not sure where. We should probably have some file such that for
> each license we can specify whether or not it is a member of some group.

GLEP 23 defines this as a file profiles/license_groups with one line per 
group, formatted: <groupname> <license1> <license2> ... <licenseN>

> With lists it isn't clear whether a license does not belong to a group or
> hasn't been considered. Unless we introduce the complement groups
> explicitly. For each group OSI we also have the group !OSI. That way the
> infos would be there, even though they would still need to be extracted by
> some tool.

Since GLEP 23 already defines a format for this, and all those tiny files 
would use excess disk blocks, perhaps something like this should be considered 
as "source" material and "compiled" into the license_groups file by a simple 
shell script. :)