I have been reporting bugs over the past few months regarding licensing issues, and inappropriate dependencies on non-Free software. Someone recommended I begin a thread on -dev, however, seeing as it may be of greater concern in regard to Gentoo's Social Contract.
Reading over the Social Contract, there is a bit of ambiguity about what is meant by Gentoo not depending on non-compliant software: does this refer to only the base system? A specific desktop or server configuration, or configurations? To the maximum extent possible where upstream makes it possible? The most recent issues I have encountered are quite troubling with regard to wanting a Free desktop OS: Gentoo now patches KDE to depend on a specific non- Free font, and Poppler has a hard dependency on the non-Free poppler-data (which is only needed for displaying non-embedded non-Latin fonts). Short of workarounds via package.provided, these two dependencies make a simple KDE desktop impossible on Gentoo without non-Free software. The xorg-x11 7.4 metapackage also added a number of dependencies on non-Free fonts. There have been a number of other similar issues I've encountered over the past year. To help mitigate this problem, I propose completion of GLEP 23's implementation; we already have a working ACCEPT_LICENSE, but the "minimum" groups (in particular, @OSI-APPROVED) are as of yet still not defined. By enabling more users to filter by approved licenses, I feel these issues will get more attention. Comments? :) Luke P.S. I'm subscribed to -nomail, so if your reply is directed specifically to me or you want to ensure I read it, feel free to CC.
