Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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|>>>>>"David" == David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com> writes:
|
|
| [...]
|
| David> Basically, by having "free" and "non-free", you lump everything
| David> together into "free" as in absolutely, strictly, lilly-white,
| David> no-strings-attached freedom, while "non-free" covers everything
| David> from reiser (free, as above, with the restriction that there must
| David> be attribution) to microsoft (you pay a huge license fee and
| David> basically sign away your soul).
|
| Actually, things Microsoft would most likely not even get into
| non-free.  Things in non-free must still be freely distributable, which
| most Microsoft things are not.

Most of them.  I wonder if all of them technically require a Windows
license?

| So there is "free", "non-free", and "not-even-packaged-because-we-can't-
| distribute-it".

Still not a whole lot of options.

| Also, non-free is technically not a part of Debian -- it is only
| maintained as a convenience to users.  Putting something in non-free
| basically means, "we can't put this into Debian proper because it
| conflicts with our Social Contract, but we recognize that users may
| still want to use it."

So it'd be a convenience to users (or maybe users should add this
themselves?) to allow for more selective allowing or disallowing of
licenses.

I don't have much personal investment in this -- I use Gentoo, and it's
fairly likely that when I get some free time, I'm going to configure it
to deal with licenses better.  This is because Gentoo already has the
foundation laid for that (and a lot of things) but no actual interface.
~ Every ebuild has a line like this:

LICENSE="GPL"

And in /usr/portage/licenses is a copy of every single license.  So what
would be nice is a way for Portage to, when given a list of packages,
prompt the user to read and agree to licenses:

Do you accept license "GPL" for package "sys-devel/gcc"?
(yes/no/always/never/read):

That wouldn't be too hard to implement for Gentoo.  I'm not sure about
Debian.  Either way, it would involve little or no maintenance on the
part of the package maintainers -- in fact, you could say that Debian
only officially supports a particular list of licenses, but let the user
go ahead and read each one and decide to agree/disagree.  It'd create a
config file that can be copied from machine to machine.

This is getting fairly offtopic for reiserfs-list, and I am losing
interest.  At least, I find Debian to be too strict about stability and
licensing, and I would use reiser4 regardless of the distro.
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