[gentoo-dev] License criteria for Gentoo

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

In the Gentoo social contract, I read:

    Gentoo Linux is and will remain Free Software 

    We will release our contributions to Gentoo Linux as free software,
    under the GNU General Public License version 2 (or later, at our
    discretion.) Any external contributions to Gentoo Linux (in the form
    of freely-distributable sources or binaries) may be incorporated into
    Gentoo Linux provided that we are legally entitled to do so. However,
    Gentoo Linux will never depend upon a piece of software unless it
    conforms to the GNU General Public License, GNU "Lesser" Public
    License or some other license approved by the Open Source Initiative
    (OSI.)

That criterion is not quite enough to achieve the stated goal, because
Licenses approved by the OSI are not necessarily Free Software
licenses.  As a result, this criterion allows Gentoo to include, and
even depend on, programs that are not free software.  (See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html for an example.)

Would you please consider changing your criterion to refer to both the
OSI and the FSF, so that licenses must qualify as both free software
and open source?

(If you would call the system Gentoo GNU/Linux, that would help us
also.  See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html.)