Concerns Arise Over Chromium OS (Accidentally?) Re-Licensing Gentoo Ebuilds

[duby229]

I would have thought you'd lose more purists by going BSD than you'd gain, though maybe the GPL purists are just more vocal under Linux, given that no BSD purists could use it, by definition.

If FreeBSD has a similar system to Portage already, it would make far more sense to just have them implement support for ebuilds - I'm sure the format has been documented somewhere.

What would be really interesting is if someone got Portage working properly under Windows. Windows is technically compliant with (some old version of) POSIX, so it might not be as hard as it sounds.

Ports works pretty good for the most part. Portage gets around blockers and circular dependancies better, but there is nothing terribly wrong with ports. I'm pretty sure ports uses modified make scripts instead of ebuilds. Basically you "cd /into/package/folder" and then "make && make install" where portage is "emerge packagename"

[duby229]

EDIT: Portage can work in windows on top of cygwin.

[Alex Libman]

Interesting. Can you explain why being Portage being GPL'd is inhibiting its adoption? My understanding was that as long as you didn't want to closed source a fork of it, the difference was largely inconsequential.

Yes, there's far-forward-looking principles / "ideology" involved. Not all people who prefer free software can't afford the proprietary alternative. Not all people who prefer open source software intend to read the code. Likewise, people in the Copyfree Initiative (like myself) prefer software unencumbered by restrictive licenses for more than just pragmatic reasons (i.e. wanting to "closed source a fork of it"). Some believe that use of copyright restrictions is immoral for whatever reasons. Some want a 100% lawyer-free experience with no surprises and licensing complications, ever - just code.

Linux has become the behemoth of the UNIX world, largely because BSD's didn't become truly free software until legal FUD was finally settled in 1994, by which time Linux had several years head start. The next half-dozen most popular FLOSS kernels (BSD's, MINIX, Haiku, various research projects, etc) are all permissively-licensed. Having a common UNIX ports system (like pkgsrc had attempted) takes a lot of effort, more than any one project in the fragmented BSD world could have attempted, but Gentoo, at the height of its popularity, IMHO had a shot. Sadly it had to use a license that had, whether for practical or ideological reasons, alienated every other UNIX (with the sole exception of Hurd).

[duby229]

Yes, there's far-forward-looking principles / "ideology" involved. Not all people who prefer free software can't afford the proprietary alternative. Not all people who prefer open source software intend to read the code. Likewise, people in the Copyfree Initiative (like myself) prefer software unencumbered by restrictive licenses for more than just pragmatic reasons (i.e. wanting to "closed source a fork of it"). Some believe that use of copyright restrictions is immoral for whatever reasons. Some want a 100% lawyer-free experience with no surprises and licensing complications, ever - just code.

Linux has become the behemoth of the UNIX world, largely because BSD's didn't become truly free software until legal FUD was finally settled in 1994, by which time Linux had several years head start. The next half-dozen most popular FLOSS kernels (BSD's, MINIX, Haiku, various research projects, etc) are all permissively-licensed. Having a common UNIX ports system (like pkgsrc had attempted) takes a lot of effort, more than any one project in the fragmented BSD world could have attempted, but Gentoo, at the height of its popularity, IMHO had a shot. Sadly it had to use a license that had, whether for practical or ideological reasons, alienated every other UNIX (with the sole exception of Hurd).

I've spent a little time reading through some gentoo forum threads. The way I understand it right now is Gentoo has portage lisenced GPL because they want as many ebuilds to come back to the project as possible. At least that's how it was in the beginning. The ideology has changed somewhat since then. Now a good number of ebuilds are only available through overlays and won't ever make it to the main portage tree. The reason portage still GPL is because of its legacy.