On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 02:40:47AM +0300, Dan Armak wrote: Content-Description: signed data > On Friday 06 June 2003 21:37, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 08:55:24PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote: > > Content-Description: signed data > > > > > On Friday 06 June 2003 19:33, Shaul Karl wrote: > > > > Can you summarize that philosophy? > > > > > > - Community and freedom. Gentoo is a community-based, volunteer-driven > > > project; it will give all its developments back to the community under > > > free licenses, and it will never depend on non-free software. It will not > > > hide problems from its users. > > > > Regarding "will never depend on non-free software": recently I tried to > > do a simple inspection of the gentoo archives regarding > > non-freely-distributable programs, and the results are that there is > > seems to be no clear separtion between free and non-free software. > > Every ebuild has a LICENSE field, and all licenses are present as files in > /usr/portage/licenses/. The user can define which licenses he accepts > (default is to accept everything). The licenses aren't (yet) grouped as free > and nonfree, perhaps that's the problem you have with it. > > The part about ever depending on nonfree software is from the Gentoo Social > Contract, and it means that the base gentoo installation will never depend on > non-free software. Not that we won't include ebuilds for non-free software, > or keep them in a separate tree.
This issue is not simply an ideaological issue. It has very practical implications: When you want to tke some parts of Gentoo, modify them, and redistibute (perhaps for a fee) the last thing you want is starting going over the LICENSE of every package. debbian-legal may be too laywerish about what is allowed in to Debain. But the result is that I don't need a lawyer when I create a commercial distro based solely on debain's main archive. So having only the base not depend on non-free is not good enough. Again, look at the example of packages that depend on Java 2 (IIRC I verified that there are such packages). There is no free implementation of it. BlackDown's JRE and JDK are freely distributable under certain conditions. I haven't checked Sun's JRE and JDK. The Gentoo mirrors contain Blackdown, which is legal. However distributing modified copies of Blackdown is not permitted by the license as is (That is because Sun gets a veto on that). What prevents a Gentoo developer from distributng a modified Blackdown package as part of the new system? And since the build is so automated, why would the developer even bother readng the documeatation (even if the documentation stated clearly "beware of distributing modified copies!"). This is an example of the gotchas of non-free programs. BTW: are you very sure all the stuff on a standard Gentoo archive is *freely-distributable* (so it can be safely mirrored)? -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
