the licence

[Luther Huffman, Jr. lutherh@infinet.com]

On Thu, 22 Feb 1996 19:08:12 -0500, you wrote:

Generous I think might be stretching it. Although I meant this as a
joke, the agreement *could* be onerous. But, as they say in legal
circles, the real meaning of an agreement is in the intent. And the
intent of the Plan 9 people is to provide source code to those who are
interested. They've done a tremendous job at this, second to no one.
   Certainly I would agree with you that I like the Plan 9 setup.
That's why I've invested a great deal of resources and effort into
supporting it.
   On a different note, bless your heart, I thought I was the only one
on earth to loath and despise Metaconfig, Configure and all of their
evil spawn. I'm the porter for Plan 9 Perl (the new object oriented
one). 95% of the perl-porters are in love with that blasted Configure.
It is the bane of my existence. The Perl configure script pure and
simply won't run under Plan 9. That means I have to edit a 30k,
ill-commented config.h header file by hand. I have no human-readable
makefile to document dependencies.
   Perl 5.002 is ready to hit the streets next week. Roughly 50 bugs
per day are being posted to the perl-porters mailing list. You may be
interested to know that perhaps 5 per week are core release bugs. The
rest deal with Configure, setup, and the like. 
   On the other hand, I'm also working on a Haskell compiler for Plan
9 (with luck it may be part of Brazil; I'm still working on buttering
up Howard Trickey, who has sold his soul to Standard ML). It currently
runs under NetBSD, uses plain old makefiles and no configure scripts.
Even though I'll have to completely rewrite the code generator and
cross-compile from an entirely different platform because it
bootstraps itself, the overall effort is much easier than the Perl
interpreter. Trying to create one distribution that can compile on all
platforms escalates the complexity to the point that the code is
unmanageable.

By the way, late tonight the Inferno team will post info about their
work on the home page late tonight, or so my mole on the team has
informed me.
>i was surprised by this comment, although i've heard it before.
>i suspect it is fast becoming a popular misconception.
>the Plan 9 licence certainly isn't a free for all,
>but seems to me to be a reasonable attempt at protecting each party's interests in
>an agreeable, equitable, and even generous manner.
>
>frankly, compared to the FSF offering, i'm willing to pay for Plan 9
>and even give up kittens, if i owned them, so as not to have to invoke one of
>those wretched `configure' scripts ever again.
>