[9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Geoff Collyer]

It was a smaller BOF than some, but lively.  Other 9fans in attendance
included Dave Presotto of Bell Labs, Ron Minnich and Andrey
Mirtchovski of Los Alamos National Laboratories, Dan Cross, Eric Van
Hensbergen, now of IBM Austin Research, and Tom Glinos of the
University of Toronto.  Also in attendance was Andrew Hume of AT&T
Research.  There were others, many of whom I didn't recognise by
sight, probably 30 or so in total.  Though much anticipated, no one
from Hanger 18 attended (or at least they didn't identify themselves).
No guns nor Harleys were in evidence.

The licence has been changed and I don't really understand the
implications, except that the Open Source Institute blessed the
penultimate version and declared it officially ``open source''.  See
plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/nntemplate.html.  It might be worth
pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if they are serious about
using the Plan 9 C compilers.

The LANL folks demonstrated their little diskless 4-machine cluster
using Linuxbios and running Plan 9.

Dave Presotto announced that pxeload is working and that he will push
ipv6config and more power pc ports out to sources.  IPSEC is not
happening, but he'd like to add process migration.  Russ Cox is
preparing a new distribution (5e?).

Rob Pike had a fairly serious bicycle accident 2 - 3 weeks ago and I'm
sure we all wish him well.  He has been back at work at Google
part-time.

I can't recall much else, but the BOF ran for two hours and a good
time was had by most, if not all.  Many people adjourned to the hotel
bar (or just outside it, as Texas and San Antonio apparently have no
non-smoking laws).

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[ron minnich]

I think the big excitement was the announcement that Plan 9 is going to be
open source. This opens it up to manuy new users that could not touch it
before. Great news.

ron

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Russ Cox]

> The licence has been changed and I don't really understand the
> implications, except that the Open Source Institute blessed the
> penultimate version and declared it officially ``open source''.  See
> plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/nntemplate.html.  It might be worth
> pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if they are serious about
> using the Plan 9 C compilers.

Try http://plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/newlicense.html for
the real (i.e., non-templated) one.

> Russ Cox is preparing a new distribution (5e?).

I am?  I mean, I am.  There were plenty of little nits with the
install process that needed fixing, so this is taking a bit longer
than I had hoped.  I also wanted to include some real content
rather than just a new license, so the new install will set up
fossil and venti servers if you so choose.  I don't think there's
enough that changed to warrant calling it 5e, though.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>I am?  I mean, I am.  There were plenty of little nits with the
>install process that needed fixing, so this is taking a bit longer
>than I had hoped.  I also wanted to include some real content
>rather than just a new license, so the new install will set up
>fossil and venti servers if you so choose.  I don't think there's
>enough that changed to warrant calling it 5e, though.
>
Should we be getting ready for driver interfaces to change?
Network driver interfaces, dev.c changes, etc?

Don


>

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Russ Cox]

> Should we be getting ready for driver interfaces to change?
> Network driver interfaces, dev.c changes, etc?

No, not at all.  Almost all the source changes that will be
in the new distribution are already on sources.
There are no fundamental changes to Plan 9 in the
forseeable future.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>No, not at all.  Almost all the source changes that will be
>in the new distribution are already on sources.
>There are no fundamental changes to Plan 9 in the
>forseeable future.
>
Oh, awesome. Then, I'll actually have some code to
contribute in the near future.

Don


>

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Geoff Collyer]

I apologise for the duplicated mail due to the alias 9fans@collyer.net
that got into mail headers (rather than being expanded); it's now
gone.

I hadn't intended to start a war; this is what I wrote:

	``It might be worth pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if
	they are serious about using the Plan 9 C compilers.''

That was just my thought in my personal notes and does not represent
anybody else's thoughts.  That quote is based on some interest
expressed by the OpenBSD folks a few months back (more or less)
suggesting that they might use the Plan 9 compilers if the licence
were more liberal (my interpretation).  It appeared that the new
licence was more liberal, given that the OSI had blessed much of it.

That's all.  Nobody's mortgage was threatened and no one was
threatened with rape.  I don't read the plan-9-licence mailing list,
so I'm undoubtedly out of touch with current licensing theology (no
pun intended).

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[George Michaelson]

Hey, apology not necessary. The list just hasn't been the same since Boyd
Roberts stopped wielding the sword. We needed a good flame-war to liven things
up.

I never thought the 9fans list would become so boring!

-george

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[boyd, rounin]

> The list just hasn't been the same since Boyd Roberts stopped wielding the
sword.

that would be a 'katana' :)

[9fans] Re: Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Jim Choate]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Geoff Collyer wrote:

> sight, probably 30 or so in total.  Though much anticipated, no one
> from Hanger 18 attended (or at least they didn't identify themselves).

'anticipated'? I don't believe that I or anyone else from the Austin group
said anything about going. <shrug>

We've been rather busy putting up nodes and such.

Thanks for the thought though.

> No guns nor Harleys were in evidence.

Believe me, there were lots of guns. Texas is the 7th largest armed group
on the planet.

The Harley's were in Austin two weeks ago, 40,000 of them if you believe
some of the claims.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage@ssz.com                            jchoate@open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [9fans] Re: Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[David Presotto]

God, the Harleys were climbing Mount Washington last week.  They get around.

Re: [9fans] Re: Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Dan Cross]

Well, there are a lot of Harleys.  They're a big clan.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Todd C. Miller]

> The licence has been changed and I don't really understand the
> implications, except that the Open Source Institute blessed the
> penultimate version and declared it officially ``open source''.  See
> plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/nntemplate.html.  It might be worth
> pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if they are serious about
> using the Plan 9 C compilers.

Unfortunately, OpenBSD can't really use the compiler unless it has
a license similar to that used by MIT, UC Berkeley, or the ISC.
Our goals are quite different from the OSI; we favor licenses that
are both clear and concise (the text of our preferred license is
just 10 lines on an 80-column terminal) and, most importantly, that
don't require a lawyer to interpret.  Anything that creates a
tortious liability for us is simply not acceptable as we have no
financial means of defending ourselves.

As it stands, the new Lucent license is not something we can use.
This is unfortunate as continued development and expansion of the
plan9 toolchain is in the best interests of both the plan9 community
and the open source community at large.  It would mean development
of additional CPU targets that could be used to bootstrap ports of
plan9 to currently unsupported platforms.

 - todd