Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo internal structure

["Brett I. Holcomb" <brettholcomb@charter.net>]

To be honest Jason, I think we need to leave it as is.  Gentoo is a distro 
that allows us to get work done and not get into the "if you use non-free 
software you have betrayed humanity" argument.  If we're not careful we will 
end up the same as Debian.  The person raising the question is a zealot who 
will accept nothing less then all free software and no non-free.  That was 
explained many times and he, like all of us have a choice - use a distro that 
fits whatever philosophy you have.   Gentoo does not have the Debian 
philosophy so for people who want that they can use Debian or another 
equivalent.  For those of us who just want to do a job and if non-free is the 
best then we'll use  the non-free/commerical stuff  and stick with Gentoo.

Why should all of us who agree with the Gentoo philosopy have to add a bunch 
of licenses stuff  to make.conf or wherever just to satisfy people who would 
be happier with Debian type distros anyway.  We can get in a situation like 
those who try to be politically correct - they are constantly modifying their 
school, program, whatever to fit the whims of the latest politically correct 
mandate.  Gentoo's social contract is available to read - if we feel so 
strongly that we can't agree to then we can go to another distro.

The id licensing is, to me, an odd case.  That's the only package it's been 
an issue.  VMware and the others seem happy to let us have it in portage - 
probably because they are time limited demos.

Don't mess with a good setup - it isn't broken so don't fix it <G>.




On Thursday 20 November 2003 20:50, you wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> This question was posted to -user as well and has turned into a huge
> discussion. It seems that the key concern of the original poster is the
> free vs non-free bit.
>
> Several weeks (months?) ago there was a discussion of licenses with regard
> to id's software. In that, I suggested that a user need to accept all
> licenses before being able to install software. That was disregarded due to
> the fact that there are 100s (297) licenses in portage.
>
> However, users being forced to accept a license was implemented for the
> specific case of id's software. I again propose that this be made the
> default for all ebuilds (through portage rather than each ebuild). To
> counter the massive amount of licenses, I suggest having reasonable
> defaults for ACCEPT_LICENSES is make.defaults.
>
> The reason for this is that the free vs non-free questioning comes up on
> -user every month or two. Each time, the answer is invariably "you wont
> find what you're looking for here". I would prefer to be able to say,
> "sure, Gentoo can do that". And it seems if the above were implemented it
> would be as easy as ACCEPT_LICENSES="-* GPL-1 GPL-2 LGPL-2 LGPL-2.1". (I'm
> not so familiar with which licenses but I'm sure someone that cares would
> be).
>
> As a added benefit, using something similar to the above would ensure that
> a stage3 tarball would never be 'polluted'. I'm sure there would be other
> benefits, too.
>
> Regards,
> Jason

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