Hi, I recently emailed the Gentoo PR team, voicing my concerns about the amount of non-free software within Gentoo. I got an interesting response from Sebastian Pipping, who said that while Gentoo is all about choice, including the choice to install non-free software, the project is interested in making it easy for people to run a 100% free system, should they choose that path.
I found out about the license filtering feature in the dev version of portage, and used it to remove all the non-free software from my system. However, it wasn't a perfect experience. Based on what Sebastian had to say, and my own experience using it, I have a few suggestions. 1) Not all of the licenses are completely accurate. For example, the Linux kernels are listed as soley GPL-2, yet they contain blobs of non-free firmware. Perhaps a general-purpose "not-free" license could be appended to such packages. This would only affect people who choose to use the feature. It could be minused from the FSF-APPROVED group for example. Also relating to this, what is freedist? The package app-text/dos2unix lists 'freedist' as its license, and /usr/portage/licenses/freedist says only "Freely Distributable". Several other packages do this, and I'm sure it's not correct. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the dos2unix package is from http://www.thefreecountry.com/tofrodos/, which clearly says its GPLv2. Packages like this could be looked into and fixed. 2) There are no free versions of the kernel in the main tree. The Latin American FSF maintains blob-free kernels at http://www.linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/releases/. They could be added alongside the official vanilla ebuilds. 3) Some free software packages bring in non-free optional dependencies by default. For example, media-gfx/imagemagick brings in media-fonts/corefonts. As suggested by Sebastian, a free profile could be created, that changes these defaults, to reduce the hassle of maintaining a free system. Again, this would only affect users who choose to use that profile. 4) Using something like ACCEPT_LICENSES="-* @FSF-APPROVED" is a good start, but its quite a hassle to keep checking all the licenses. One annoyance is packages like sys-devel/gcc. gcc has the libgcc license, which is just GPLv2+, with some extra permissions granted. Although it's important to make such a distinction, these extra freedoms are irrelevant to license filtering. I suppose the only feasible way to fix this would be to expand the license groups in /usr/portage/profiles/license_groups. Would it cause any problems if they were quite large? Another option might be to introduce an optional IS_FREE="yes/no" option to the ebuild files, which could override the other license settings. 5) Documentation on how to set up and maintain a fully free system could be added. To summarize, my general idea is to fix some licensing issues, introduce the libre kernels and have a 100% free profile that would create the least possible amount of hassle for anyone using it. This in turn would make Gentoo more accessible to the free software community, without affecting people that don't use the profile. This is my first post here, so I apologize if it's misdirected. I'm not sure if I'd really be able to help much on the technical side, but if this garners any cooperation, I'll gladly help out with anything I can. If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful. Kind Regards, Vincent Launchbury.
