Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On 01/07/2010 01:19 AM, Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> All I'm asking for is that users who care about this will be shown an
> accurate license,

I think that this really sums this whole thing up.  Can you run a 
computer with ONLY FOSS on it (firmware to ROMs to hard drive 
controlers) - probably not, but maybe.  I think that is really a 
separate matter.

I think this really just boils down to this:  If we have a piece of 
metadata on a package it should be accurate.  The license should reflect 
the license of whatever ends up on a user's hard drive.  Maybe knowing 
the license isn't that important - in that case maybe we shouldn't track 
licenses at all.  However, if we're going to track the license, then it 
should be completely accurate (or at least we should aim for that even 
if Gentoo metadata can never be perfect).  That's why I also support 
having GPL2 vs GPL2+ / etc in the license field.  Sure, it won't be 
exactly right for a while, but it is worth shooting for.

Ditto for other metadata - homepages should be official, maintainers 
should be active, and all that.  QA will always have work to do as this 
will never be 100% right for everything in the tree, but there is value 
in being accurate anytime we can be.

By all means the default install should have an ACCEPT_LICENSE that is 
both legal and fully functional - if people want to trim it down that is 
up to them.  Maybe somebody wants to use Gentoo to build an appliance 
and they want to go pure non-copyleft - that's a major chore but we 
could still give them a great head-start on identifying where the issues 
with that are and at least getting them 80% of a functional system.

I think this whole thread really boils down to - make the license 
accurate.  What users do with it is up to them, and we don't need to 
support non-standard configurations just because we make them possible.