Re: Gentoo GNU/Linux and non-free packages

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

Marek Aaron Sapota <maarons@gnu.org> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 12:56:13PM +0100, Tassilo Horn wrote:
>> I've just checked xorg-x11, and it has only hard dependencies to fonts
>> licensed under the MIT license or public domain.  I guess, I've set some
>> use flag, which enables this additional dependency.
>
> I've just checked what I have removed from the ebuild: Bigelow & Holmes
> fonts - they are now labelled as MIT licensed. Unless the license was
> changed recently it is incorrect, this fonts didn't permit changing them
> if I remember right. 

Is that the correct license?

  http://www.xfree86.org/current/LICENSE11.html

Looks quite MIT-style to me.  Do what you want, but keep this copyright
notice.

>> > To be a Free Distribution Gentoo would have to show commitment to
>> > Free Software and they clearly don't.
>> 
>> The social contract does:
>
> In practice try installing Netbeans and see how it fails on
> proprietary dependences.

I only had a brief look, but it seems it fails because of the license
groups aren't complete yet.  I checked some required but license masked
packages, and they were all free, although not GPL compatible,
e.g. CDDL, Apache...

Oh, well, there are some of those jsr packages (Java Specification
Request).  As far as I understand from

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Community_Process

those are reference implementations to new java features, which might
eventually be included in the java language spec.

What would be interesting, is to know if the usual netbeans installer
comes with and installs those proprietary addons.  If yes, then we
should thank Gentoo for making us aware of those.

Bye,
Tassilo