Gentoo GNU/Linux and non-free packages (was: 'bzr init-repo .' crashes for lack of module bz2. Help, please!)

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> If you use Gentoo, you have to work really hard to avoid installing
> non-free software.

Indeed, Gentoo also ships non-free packages and has no simple switch to
tell the package manager to never install non-free packages.  But at
least when installing a package, you can easily get a list of it and its
dependencies including the licenses.

And if there are free alternatives, some packages recommend you to use
those instead.  For example, when trying to install Adobe Flash, you are
told, that it is non-free and a source for various security risks, and
that you might want to try GNU gnash instead.

And another thing: It's quite easy to get a list of all installed
packages sorted by their licenses with

  eix -I --format-compact \
    '<licenses>: <category>/<name><installedversions:INSTFORMAT>\n' \
    -c | sort | less

> Someone recently told me that some innocent-sounding package pulled in
> some non-free fonts, and he found out about this because the font
> package wanted him to agree to an EULA.

Hm, using the command above, it seems that those fonts must be
Microsoft's corefonts package, which is free to use and distribute, but
you may not modify them.  (For fonts, that's nearly acceptable, except
if that EULA wouldn't forbid to derive a new font with a new name from
those fonts.)

Anyway, using

  equery depends media-fonts/corefonts

I gathered the information that this package was installed as an
optional dependency of ImageMagick.  So I removed the USE flag
(something like a configure option) for that package, which triggered
that dependency, and now it's gone.

Summing up: it's not very hard to keep a Gentoo system clean from
non-free stuff, but in general I'd welcome it if all non-free stuff
would be moved to some separate non-free repository, which users would
have to subscribe to manually.

Bye,
Tassilo