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