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

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

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

    A Gentoo developer has raised concerns over bad licensing and attribution by ChromiumOS and CoreOS for their copies of Gentoo ebuilds...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Yeah, it doesn't seem intentional. Someone just didn't watch what their script was doing close enough. Hopefully it gets fixed soon though.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by siavashserver
      Am I the only one who thinks licensing build scripts is totally stupid?
      Lesser things than that are subject to patent by proprietary companies. If nothing else, it's probably a good defensive strategy to put as much code as possible under permissive licenses.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by siavashserver
        Am I the only one who thinks licensing build scripts is totally stupid?
        Yes. Everything should be licensed with some license (if devs don't like available licenses they can write their own) and propper authorship must be made known.
        Without this, no distribution would ever touch/(re)use your stuff (portage, package format and rules - EAPI in this case).

        Also, you would be amazed just how many man-hours and effort went into writing ebuilds and making sure they work with all USEs (configure flags) on supported architectures.

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        • #5
          It looks like an unintentional mistake, as headers and copyrights on the files themselves remain intact.

          But with these corporations you never know.
          Last edited by newwen; 07 March 2015, 03:11 PM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by siavashserver
            Am I the only one who thinks licensing build scripts is totally stupid?
            There's a reason the GPL requires build scripts to be included - they can be extremely non-trivial. In some cases (e.g. autotools), the build scripts can be more complex and larger than the project itself. Given that they are easily programs in their own right, they have to be licensed somehow.

            I do agree with your sentiment though, if not the wording of it. It's not that licensing build scripts is stupid, it's that the build scripts shouldn't even be so complex as to be copyrightable. Pity that's not normally the case...

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            • #7
              Copyleft is annoying

              Back in 2010, I've tried proposing a more permissive license for Portage on the Gentoo Forum (which, for one thing, would have opened the door to their "alternative kernel" porting efforts being taken more seriously, and Portage becoming a universal UNIX ports system).

              Some people liked the idea, most didn't... They must be real worried about Microsoft coming in and closed-sourcing all that Python code, just to make it easier to compile FLOSS software on other operating systems...

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Alex Libman View Post
                Back in 2010, I've tried proposing a more permissive license for Portage on the Gentoo Forum (which, for one thing, would have opened the door to their "alternative kernel" porting efforts being taken more seriously, and Portage becoming a universal UNIX ports system).

                Some people liked the idea, most didn't... They must be real worried about Microsoft coming in and closed-sourcing all that Python code, just to make it easier to compile FLOSS software on other operating systems...
                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.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by rdnetto View Post
                  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.
                  I'm assuming he's talking about ideological stoppers in BSD camp. It couldn't really be universal for Unix unless BSD's took it into use. Also FreeBSD also has something similar to portage so there could also be synergy benefits

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by nanonyme View Post
                    I'm assuming he's talking about ideological stoppers in BSD camp. It couldn't really be universal for Unix unless BSD's took it into use. Also FreeBSD also has something similar to portage so there could also be synergy benefits
                    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.

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