From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>
To: "Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org>
Cc: gentoo-nfp@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 1/4] Social contract: Change OSI approved to FSF approved
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 21:59:01 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <uzfqd6tmi@gentoo.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <robbat2-20240719T164800-693106129Z@orbis-terrarum.net> (Robin H. Johnson's message of "Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:55:08 +0000")
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>>>>> On Fri, 19 Jul 2024, Robin H Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 07:44:12AM +0200, Ulrich Müller wrote:
>> Rationale:
>> - The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License is approved by
>> the FSF but not by the OSI.
>> - The OSI has approved some dubious licenses (e.g. Watcom-1.0) which
>> we do not want.
>> - FSF approved is more in line with the term "free software" (instead
>> of "open source") that is used throughout.
>> - GLEP 76 says "approved as GPL compatible by the Free Software
>> Foundation" (which is a stronger requirement).
> NAK in the present format.
> "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it conforms to ... or some other license approved by the FSF"
> "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it conforms to ... or some other license approved by the FSF"
> What does that really mean for us?
> The impacted things are licenses that are OSI-approved but *NOT*
> FSF-approved, and count as "Gentoo depends on this".
> Artistic License 1.0: licenses/Artistic (note that Artistic-2 is FSF-approved)
> NASA: nothing packaged
> Watcom: 2 packages, nothing critical
> Artistic-1 is common in older Perl packages - and they tend to NOT have
> the || GPL variant in their licensing.
I state that the current wording with OSI-approved isn't any better.
OSI-approved isn't a superset of GPL-approved, e.g. CC0-1.0 (which is
used for software) is missing.
> We need to verify the "depends on this" argument before we can make this
> change.
I think that multiple interpretations are possible:
1. It applies only to our own works, like ebuilds and documentation that
are authored by developers and contributors. I believe that in this
case we would be fine with GPL-approved (but not with OSI-approved
because of CC-BY-SA used as documentation license).
2. In addition, it also applies to everything that is needed for Gentoo
as an operating system, i.e. at least all packages that are needed
for the install media and stages. Presumably, in that case even the
union of @FSF-APPROVED, @FSF-APPROVED-OTHER and @OSI-APPROVED won't
be enough, but we'd need most that is listed in @FREE. Especially,
we'd need some of the licenses in @MISC-FREE that aren't approved by
either organisation.
(Also, what about non-free firmware in the second case?)
> Or we need a different way to say which licenses are valid (like
> excluding the Watcom & NASA licenses).
I am strongly opposed to a license blacklist in the Social Contract.
How about this:
"Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata
unless it conforms to ... or some other license that fulfills the
[Free Software Definition](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)
or the [Definition of Free Cultural Works](https://freedomdefined.org/)."
This is basically how we operate in practice, assuming the default
ACCEPT_LICENSE="@FREE" setting.
IIUC Debian doesn't rely on FSF or OSI approval either, but they keep
their own list of (DFSG-approved) licenses.
Ulrich
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-07-19 19:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-07-19 5:44 [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 0/4] Some updates to the Social Contract Ulrich Müller
2024-07-19 5:44 ` [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 1/4] Social contract: Change OSI approved to FSF approved Ulrich Müller
2024-07-19 16:55 ` Robin H. Johnson
2024-07-19 19:59 ` Ulrich Mueller [this message]
2024-07-19 20:44 ` Robin H. Johnson
2024-07-19 5:44 ` [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 2/4] Social contract: Exceptions to the public bug policy Ulrich Müller
2024-07-19 5:44 ` [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 3/4] Social contract: Update spelling of CC-BY-SA license Ulrich Müller
2024-07-19 5:44 ` [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 4/4] Social contract: Restore Gentoo metastructure link Ulrich Müller
2024-07-19 22:27 ` [gentoo-nfp] [PATCH 0/4] Some updates to the Social Contract Michael Orlitzky
2024-07-19 23:20 ` Ulrich Mueller
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