From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 02:28:25 +0100
From: forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk
Subject: [9fans] plan 9 interest
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 81d6e780-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19980924012825.niII6shH1ittKN6hqFCqme2GDcUJnN_9ko-xXNeaci8@z>

>>there was more interest amongst the more technically inclined (though some of them
>>are damn hard to wean off vi) but as soon as they found that (a) they'd have to pay
>>to get the source and (b) they couldn't give away their work that was based on Plan 9,

as long as they were at the university they'd have been covered by the department's
plan 9 licence, even on their own machines (as i understood it),
owing to the splendid transitive closure clause,
except that the licence also constrained
us to protect the source to some extent, and i wanted to make
an honest effort to do that, which seemed to preclude general read or
even student group access.
i was also a little worried that someone might tar the thing up for ftp.
interest might well have been greater if any student who was interested had
been able to access the source straightforwardly, to read and change.
i ought to have made it easier.

giving modifications away is not too hard if on a scale that boddle
can sensibly handle, but it can be quite tricky to publish complex
updates, as i found when publishing the changes to add
powerpc support.  the result requires a bit of effort to unpack
and install, and it was fairly tedious to put together
(compared to tar'ing the raw source).

the (possible) terms for a (potential) new distribution should address
both those points.