Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Oct 2015 21:56:52 +0300
> Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 1) GitHub _was already blocked_ in several countries [1]. We are an
>> international community, thus we can't rely on such resource.
>
> And no doubt Gentoo will be blocked at some point, if it becomes
> popular enough and continues to include software which upsets people.

Of course, the whole point of the social contract is that if Gentoo is
ever "blocked" or taken over by a hostile interest, etc, then
everything of value that makes us what we are is already FOSS.

Ideally we should get to a state where all of infra (minus things like
credentials or personal info) is documented and trivial for anybody to
copy.  That would both make it easier for others to contribute and
make it easy to roll your own Gentoo should that be useful.

We haven't really pushed for a copyright attribution solution, but
even there we were looking at something like the FSFe FLA which is
designed to prevent being held hostage by a hostile owner (maybe the
trustees lose their minds or somebody sues Gentoo, prevails, and is
awarded all our copyrights).

In any case, I think the arguments have been hashed out.  FWIW I fully
support the social contract and the importance of building on FOSS.
At the same time, we should be pragmatic when somebody comes along
with a largely-free solution and nobody else is stepping up with a
completely-free alternative.  I suspect we'll manage to find a
reasonable compromise.

-- 
Rich