From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri,  7 Apr 1995 22:11:22 -0400
From: forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk
Subject: what, me worry?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0b8c00ec-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950408021122.fEnc-PrM8Rm4C2A__rr9ztXn9vr0oDI78W9ptIKybWE@z>

Victor Yodaiken makes some interesting points.
even so, since any angst we express now is unlikely to sway AT&T legal people,
and the plan 9 developers almost certainly have a model for licences that
they are pressing for internally, it might save some anguish if we
wait to see exactly what the licence terms are for non-commercial and commercial
licences.  then we can panic.  if need be.

my opinion (and this is a tip of an iceberg) is that the AT&T/BSD lawsuit
was a peculiar case.  i think i can see why both parties acted as they did,
but i believe serious mistakes were made on both sides, and the whole
thing was frankly ill-advised.

i think it's probably true that distributing source code widely under licence
raises some practical questions that do not arise with binary distributions.
i am not sure it is without precedent, but even so,
as always with legal or quasi-legal matters, the best approach seems to be
to develop mechanisms as early as possible that protect the interests of
all parties (and i hope we agree that the plan 9 developers have significant
interests in the source code) without having to involve too many lawyers.