Re: [gentoo-project] changing the default of ACCEPT_LICENSE in portage

[hasufell]

On 07/30/2013 05:08 PM, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 20:31 Thu 25 Jul     , hasufell wrote:
>> Gentoo has a social contract [1] which makes a lot of noise about free
>> software. However our default settings allow to use almost any kind of
>> non-free license such as "all-rights-reserved".
>>
>> While I see nothing wrong with gentoo providing proprietary stuff (and
>> I have created a lot of such games ebuilds), I think according to our
>> philsophy and social contract we should make people aware of free
>> software and because of that also change the default to:
>>
>> ACCEPT_LICENSE="@FREE"
>>
>> This is only about the _default_. We will have to change the handbook
>> at "1.d. Licenses" [2] and might also make a news item.
>
> Gentoo has been and should remain a pragmatic distribution rather than
> promoting a specific licensing philosophy to our users.

We are already doing that by declaring:
"Gentoo is and will remain Free Software".

> We've always
> focused on providing *reasonable* rather than *restrictive* or *minimal*
> defaults,

Setting @FREE as a default _is_ reasonable, because it underlines what
is already in our social contract and might help to make people more
aware of it at extremely low cost.

> in the interest of keeping the barrier to entry lower and
> lessening the effort required to set up a functional Gentoo
> installation.
>

That argument has already been brought up here and it doesn't make much
sense in this context. It's an effort of changing/adding a _single_ line
in make.conf and is even documented in the handbook.

> I don't see any conflict between requiring that our system packages be
> free software and providing the pragmatic experience that we also
> promise to our users in our philosophy:

I don't see any conflict between requiring the user to accept unfree
licenses explicitly and our philosophy.
In fact, we are already forcing interaction with that variable via "-@EULA".