Gentoo: We’re not the Napster of Open Source

In response to my recent blog entry regarding Sun’s OpenSolaris, its 1600 patents and whether they’ll create a safer legal haven to which Linux developers will be drawn, the folks at Gentoo are disputing my characterization of their Portaris and Portage technologies as being Napster-like facilitators that can grease the wheels of open source license violation. In a string of e-mails with Pieter Van den Abeele wrote “To be completely honest, at this time Portaris has not been merged with main Portage tree….Unlike Napster we do not allow the user to violate any licenses. If we are made aware of possible ways in which our technology can create products that violate the component licenses, then we’ll work on fixing those anomalies.”