[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo's Social Contract & Bugzilla

[Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>]

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Peter Gordon wrote:
> Matthew Marlowe wrote:
>> If we could get a license donated, my vote would be to switch to Atlassian 
>> Jira, http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira.   It seems to be gaining 
>> mindshare rather quickly, and the company I work for just shelled out $2,400 
>> because they liked it so much more than RT/Bugzilla. I believe it supports 
>> multiple DB backends, including all the usual suspects.  
> 
> Maybe it's just me, but I think that having such a core component of the
> distribution be proprietary is in complete violation of Gentoo's Social
> Contract[1] (if not the letter of it, then its spirit of openness). It
> states:
> 	
> 	"Gentoo will never never depend upon a piece of software or
> 	metadata unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License,
> 	the GNU Lesser General Public License, the Creative Commons -
> 	Attribution/Share Alike or some other license approved by the
> 	Open Source Initiative (OSI)."
> 
> Isn't this one of the driving reasons why our forums run phpBB instead
> of something like vBulletin, for example? :)
> 
> [1] http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/contract.xml

I'm not entirely sure if this is directed towards the supporting web
applications or of Gentoo itself. To me its directed towards the meta
distribution and not any of the underlying support mechanisms of Gentoo.
 If we were to use some non-gpl webapp, the underlying Gentoo system you
run does not depend on a non-gpl piece of software. A bug tracking
system is not an underlying component of Gentoo. Its just a tool that
helps with development of Gentoo.

But anyways, some people view it in the strict sense and they're
entitled to it. That's just how I view it when I read it. Its a bit
vague on what Gentoo really is. Is it talking only about the meta
distribution? Or that plus the underlying supporting systems that help
run Gentoo?

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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