Title: Change of ACCEPT_LICENSE default Author: Ulrich Müller Author: Thomas Deutschmann Posted: 2019-05-23 Revision: 2 News-Item-Format: 2.0 The default set of accepted licenses has been changed [1,2] to: ACCEPT_LICENSE="-* @FREE" This means that by default only free software and documentation will be installable. The "FREE" license group is defined in the profiles/license_groups file in the Gentoo repository. It contains licenses that are explicitly approved by the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or that follow the Free Software Definition. The system wide default for the accepted licenses is controlled by the ACCEPT_LICENSE variable in /etc/portage/make.conf, or it can be specified on a per-package basis in /etc/portage/package.license. For example, to allow the app-arch/unrar and sys-kernel/linux-firmware packages to be installed, the following lines would have to be added to /etc/portage/package.license: app-arch/unrar unRAR sys-kernel/linux-firmware @BINARY-REDISTRIBUTABLE A migration tool app-portage/elicense is available. It scans installed packages for licenses that are no longer accepted, and generates a list in the same format as the package.license file. See elicense's README for further details. If you want to revert to the previous default, add the following line to /etc/portage/make.conf: ACCEPT_LICENSE="* -@EULA" This will permit all licenses, except End User License Agreements that require reading and signing an acceptance agreement. Note that this will also accept non-free software and documentation. See GLEP 23 [3] as well as the make.conf(5) and portage(5) man pages for the detailed syntax of the ACCEPT_LICENSE variable. Further information about licenses can be found in the Gentoo Handbook [4] and on the license groups wiki page [5]. [1] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190210-summary.txt [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/676248 [3] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0023.html [4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Working/Portage#Licenses [5] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/License_groups