Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Clarify the "as-is" license?

[<lists@aixah.de>]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:38:50 -0400
Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 5:21 PM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> The license isn't binary-only.  The license is BSD.  It just happens
> that the thing they're licensing is the binary and not the source.
> 
> Does it really matter?  Before we start overloading the LICENSE flag
> to represent something other than the license we should probably have
> a problem to actually fix.
> 
> As far as freedom of code goes, arguably the code is perfectly free -
> it just isn't open source.  You could legally decompile, modify,
> recompile, and redistribute it and your assembly language sources as
> much as you like.

Imho software as it's described here shouldn't get a LICENSE which is
in @FREE, such as BSD.

For a software to be free, it has to be possible to change it in any
way you want. And "to be possible" and "to be allowed" really aren't
the same here! (Except if you are either masochistic or one of these
gurus which eat assembly code for breakfast).

I have an ACCEPT_LICENSE="-* @FREE" in my make.conf, so I expect that
there's only free software on my system (except for those packages I
explicitly allowed via package.license, for sure). I couldn't make this
assumption anymore if software as you describe it would get a @FREE
LICENSE.

Cheers,
aranea