Re: [gentoo-project] What should the default acceptable licenses be?

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 5:52 PM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 4:04 PM Kristian Fiskerstrand <k_f@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > My personal opinion is we should have a default accepting FSF and OSI
> > approved free/libre licenses and require acceptance for anything else
> > though package.license / ACCEPT_LICENSE.
>
> From a practical standpoint is this going to block anything used on
> our stage3s or boot CDs needed for hardware support, such as firmware
> blobs/etc?  I imagine most packages like this would not have
> FSF/OSI-approved licenses.  That includes linux-firmware.
>

I think the stage3 is already pretty minimal anyway, I'd be curious about
what it would lose if we did this.


>
> I'm not sure if those are installed by default or how essential they
> are to actually boot/use any common hardware.
>

I want to avoid having a singular product here. I think ::gentoo is the
repo that is the metadistribution and we can basically have defaults there.
Consumers of ::gentoo are expected to tweak it. I think this is different
than say, a liveDVD image. The latter we don't expect users to tweak before
using and we should be trying to support normal use cases. If we need to
use non-free firmware to do it, I expect us to do that so that users who
boot the media actually get a working Gentoo install.

So I don't buy an argument that "Gentoo" as a whole has to do a particular
thing. I expect this discussion is actually more about "the Gentoo repo"
than about any particular shipped media. Maybe I'm misunderstanding things
though.


>
> Aside from this, Gentoo has always been more about pragmatism when it
> comes to licensing.  We certainly make it easy to restrict licenses
> and have a pure-free system, but I'm not sure how painful it would be
> for users to have this be a default.
>
> In particular how likely is this to cause users to end up doing a
> substantial rebuild 5 minutes after booting their stage3 just to get
> the system back to a more "practical" state?  Granted, bindist
> probably already causes these sorts of issues but we have no choice
> there.
>

I take the Bezos approach here. There are 2 types of decisions: reversible
and irreversible. This is a reversible decision pretty much, so its low
risk. If we change the default and the world starts to hate us, we can just
change it back.

-A


>
> --
> Rich
>
>

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