On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 12:36:34AM -0500, Vincent Launchbury wrote: > 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. Actually, this is a case where the license on the ebuild is wrong, not the license group. The kernel ebuilds should have GPL-2 and something else, and by definition should not pass @FSF-APPROVED alone.
> 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. tofrodos is NOT dos2unix. If you compare the sources you'll see they are radically different. The COPYRIGHT file in dos2unix is actually a 2-clause BSD license. I've updated the ebuild suitably. Yes, we do definitely need to review licenses on packages where they aren't clear, correct any mistakes. > 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. File a bug with some 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. A profile is not the answer here. An optional DEP block || ( media-fonts/corefonts ... ) where the other item does resolve using ACCEPT_LICENSES is what should be used. In this line of work, we would greatly appreciate bugs being filed for all cases where dependencies are not resolvable with your reasonable ACCEPT_LICENSES setting. > 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? No, the file can become a lot larger before any problems come up. I deliberately introduced @BINARY-REDISTRIBUTABLE to help packaging of the 10.x release. They simply set that into their ACCEPT_LICENSES and then we're reasonable set. In your case, I propose that we add one or more stacked groups, with an initial content as such: License group name: LIBRE-FREE Purpose: easily selectable license group for libre-free systems. Initial license group contents: @FSF-APPROVED @GPL-COMPATIBLE @OSI-APPROVED @LIBRE-FREE-1 License group name: LIBRE-FREE-1 Purpose: license group to put additional special-case libre-free licenses in. Initial license group contents: libgcc libstdc++ gcc-runtime-library-exception-3.1 We might be able to merge LIBRE-FREE-1 directly into the LIBRE-FREE entry, the portage folk would be able to answer if there would be a performance benefit to having it split or not. > Another option might be to introduce an optional IS_FREE="yes/no" option > to the ebuild files, which could override the other license settings. No. > 5) Documentation on how to set up and maintain a fully free system could > be added. Under my license_group proposal: # echo 'ACCEPT_LICENSES="-* @LIBRE-FREE"' >>/etc/make.conf done. -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead E-Mail : robb...@gentoo.org GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
pgppJJZ2R6qZ2.pgp
Description: PGP signature
