Christian Birchinger wrote: > It might sound a bit rude but i think the defaults should be > defined that most of the time only zealots need to tweak > them. I think most users don't care about most licenses and > shouldn't need to mess with this.
I've seen several people express this attitude, and I like it a lot. Let me tell you about my retirement plan. I'm going to write a game, Linux-only, make it good enough that a few hundred of you will emerge it and try it out. Then I'll change the license agreement so that next time you emerge the game you'll owe me $1million US. Since you all have ACCEPT_LICENSES="*" as the default, you'll all accept my new license, I'll take you all to court (after subpoenaing apache logs from all the mirrors so I know who you are, and subpoenaing your make.conf and make.globals to prove you accepted the license), and sue you for my license fee. If I can recover 1% of what you'll all owe me, I'll be happy enough. Okay, that's NOT REALLY my plan. I'm at least slightly ethical. (-: But it illustrates why you don't under any circumstances want ACCEPT_LICENSES="*", either as the default or as an option. Accepting a license has consequences, and those consequences can hurt you.* I'd recommend against letting the parser recognize a wildcard for licenses -- there's just too much danger for people who don't know any better to hurt themselves. That's my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. * For a real life example that's somewhat less heinous, consider the BitKeeper license. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
