plan 9 and other operating systems

plan 9 and other operating systems

[Victor]

On Apr 7,  5:43am, forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk wrote:
 Subject: plan 9 and other operating systems
>i recently replied to a question about how plan 9 compared to Linux.
>this prompted an important addition from rob, and comments from several
>others.  whilst i was considering the question further last night,

I have one serious comment. Linux is a mess, but A) it works, and
B) it is totally unencumbered, and C) it has a large and active
distributed free support system. While I am happy to have access
to Plan9 and look forward to the new release, I am reluctant to 
rely on it in for educational purposes because of the sorry history
of access to UNIX. Suppose we organized an ongoing o.s. research
group and developed new facilities (say real-time or fault recovery)
starting from the ATT code. Would we find ourselves in the same
situation as Berkeley -- without the extensive legal staff of the
UC system? This is not a complaint -- I realize that the folks
at ATT research have little control over coporate legal policy.
But, I did want to explain why some of us litigation-shy folks are
tempted by Linux despite the poor coding and sloppy design.

plan 9 and other operating systems

[Bill]

> 
> 
>    I have one serious comment. Linux is a mess, but A) it works, and
>    B) it is totally unencumbered, [...]
> 
> I'm not going to holler about the implementation of (and the number of
> things that *don't* work in) Linux here.  I'll save that for another
> day.
> 
> However, I feel compelled to bash on your point B a bit.  Linux is in
> fact quite encumbered.  The GPL forces a distributor to either always
> give you source with any binaries, or to (essentially) become a
> clearing house for very cheap copies of the source for anyone
> requesting them.  If you don't believe that, go read the license.
> This can be a big hassle for some people, and it's clear that some (of
> not most) Linux distributors just violate the GPL and don't worry
> about it.

This is completely wrong you can sell commercial produces for linux you
just can use parts of GPL code in your commercial product.



-- 
Bill Broadley		Broadley@math.ucdavis.edu	    UCD Math Sys-Admin
Linux is great.		http://ucdmath.ucdavis.edu/~broadley            PGP-ok

plan 9 and other operating systems

[Charles]

   I have one serious comment. Linux is a mess, but A) it works, and
   B) it is totally unencumbered, [...]

I'm not going to holler about the implementation of (and the number of
things that *don't* work in) Linux here.  I'll save that for another
day.

However, I feel compelled to bash on your point B a bit.  Linux is in
fact quite encumbered.  The GPL forces a distributor to either always
give you source with any binaries, or to (essentially) become a
clearing house for very cheap copies of the source for anyone
requesting them.  If you don't believe that, go read the license.
This can be a big hassle for some people, and it's clear that some (of
not most) Linux distributors just violate the GPL and don't worry
about it.

This is not to say that it's more encumbered than, say, Plan 9, which,
from what I've heard, you can't give away at all.

   Would we find ourselves in the same situation as Berkeley --
   without the extensive legal staff of the UC system?

I'm not sure that's a fair comment.  I don't speak for Bell Labs,
obviously, but it's my impression that at least some people there were
very much *not* in favor of the law suit.  USL sort of spun off and
started doing its own thing, and it's not clear that the Labs had any
control over it by that point.

plan 9 and other operating systems

[forsyth]

i recently replied to a question about how plan 9 compared to Linux.
this prompted an important addition from rob, and comments from several
others.  whilst i was considering the question further last night,
including the replies about Mach and NetBSD, it occurred to me that
i might have given a terse, yet general reply to the question
that accurately conveys the essential difference between plan 9
and other candidates.

so, i'll have another go.

>>How is it compared to ...?
plan 9 is cool.