[9fans] re: license terms?

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Douglas]

Tom Glinos wrote:
> The real question in my mind is how do we get good corporate research
> into the general community in todays environment. Plan 9's ultimate
> value may not be in finished code, but in the spread of good ideas.

Indeed.  Rob & Dennis described some of Plan 9's key ideas to me
well before it was "released", and I adapted some of the thinking
to a large networked project I was working on.  Not everything has
to be done as part of an operating system.  (Witness Inferno on
foreign-OS hosts.)

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Ralph]

Hi,

> The issue is OS code, not biotech patents. Different businesses.
>
> And friend, you don't know me and you definitely don't know my
> experience with corporate lawyers.

I think the point you seemed to have missed was your original post was
a little impolite when set against this newsgroup's unusually high
standard.  To my British ears, your last paragraph again transgressed.
But that could be the difficulty in both speaking a common language in
different tongues.  Of course, we were there first ;-)


Ralph.

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Douglas]

Anssi Porttikivi wrote:
>
> I guess the question is, what is the business model going to be. If you
> ("the company")

trust me, 'I' am not 'the company'.
We all try to work on things that we feel are compelling.
Nobody wants to spend life in a hole moving dirt around. However, there
are other people in the management and marketing chains that decide
where products and programs go. We present a product map, a schedule,
and a budget; then a management team says go or stop. The efforts of
any indivdual enginneer can make a difference in the development of a
product, but has little to no impact on its distribution and marketing.

> believe you can't make money selling an operating system,
> then don't. But I guess you want to sell something! The license will have to
> reflect that decision. I understand perfectly, that the management doesn't
> like the attitude that you will just give the source code away and pray that
> the magic of the free software movement brings back glory and money.

More than doesn't like it. If you give something away without prior
approval, you have just lost your job. And when you go for another job
and you say "I lost my last job because I 'open-sourced' a product I
worked on, against the wishes of my employer" you will not get a new job.
It may be a sad thing to say that, but it is the truth. And as I said before,
at my little level in the scheme of things, paying the mortgage, clothing and
feeding my family, those ALL come first. All the fame and glory of the
world is worth less than dirt if it doesn't take care of my kids.

> You could try selling the OS. There's must be more to the world of OS' than
> Microsoft, proprietary Unix clones, free Unix clones and obscure niche OS'
> by unknown companies. Personally I believe there is a market for a
> well-branded, technologically advanced ("smaller, faster, more versatile,
> more reliable than both Windows and Linux") general purpose OS marketed by a
> well known big company.

I agree. How the marketing side of Inferno got botched, I have no idea.
I wasn't there. I waited for a long time for a reference design to be
released on widely available VME based hardware. To no avail. I do
deeply embedded things for a living. No display or keyboard. No sound.
I thought Inferno had some very interesting possibilities for distributed
applications, which my old area was heavily involved in. As it is, they
use vxWorks. I would have loved to seen a distribution model that followed
that of most RTOS vendors. I, for one, do not care to see the source code.
If it works straight out of the box on my hardware, great. I have enough
work to do without porting the OS to my hardware.

> All it needs is a full application suite to get it started and some
> marketing. OS is like a language, nobody likes it unless it has a living
> culture of users (=applications) around it.

Or unless it provides a powerful abstraction that enables the development
of complex systems that are robust, easy to architect, easy to build.
For example, the 'living culture' of ObjecTime is very small, but when
properly put to use, it is an amazing tool.

> I think the best license choice would be to distribute a shareware version
> for a registration fee. Then you could sell various "professional" editions
> with a higher price through various channels. Most of the source could be
> made open, but not necessarily all has to. One interesting source code
> licensing mode is the one used by Troll Tech which makes the Qt toolkit
> which is used in Linux KDE environment: you can use the code freely in free
> products, but it costs to use it in commercial software.

I agree with most of this statement. The core system should be a common
abstraction that can be linked as a library to the drivers that provide
the hardware layer. The source for that hardware layer should be open.
That provides a template for development that promotes the use of the
system on as wide a base of hardware as possible, at the same time, keeping
the core of the system intact such that you do not end up with a million
subtle variations on the theme.

I will happily say that my view is colored by my joyful experience of
developing embedded applications. I like my job, I just wish I had some
better tools to do it with. The old models are getting a bit tired.

Doug

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Tom]

>I guess the question is, what is the business model going to be. If you
>("the company") believe you can't make money selling an operating system,

Forget the business model. Forget the real life issues of actually running
a business. These are REAL hard to get right. That's why 90%+ of business
fail.

The real question in my mind is how do we get good corporate research
into the general community in todays environment. Plan 9's ultimate
value may not be in finished code, but in the spread of good ideas.

--
=================
The hardest thing to see		| Tom Glinos @ U of Toronto Statistics
is the way things REALLY are.		| tg@utstat.toronto.edu

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Tom]

>discoveries, particularly in biotech. I would love to see you
>convince some of _those_ lawyers to give away some of _those_ patents,
>particularly when they bring millions of dollars into their

The issue is OS code, not biotech patents. Different businesses.

And friend, you don't know me and you definitely don't know
my experience with corporate lawyers.

--
=================
The hardest thing to see		| Tom Glinos @ U of Toronto Statistics
is the way things REALLY are.		| tg@utstat.toronto.edu

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Anssi]

I guess the question is, what is the business model going to be. If you
("the company") believe you can't make money selling an operating system,
then don't. But I guess you want to sell something! The license will have to
reflect that decision. I understand perfectly, that the management doesn't
like the attitude that you will just give the source code away and pray that
the magic of the free software movement brings back glory and money.

You could try selling the OS. There's must be more to the world of OS' than
Microsoft, proprietary Unix clones, free Unix clones and obscure niche OS'
by unknown companies. Personally I believe there is a market for a
well-branded, technologically advanced ("smaller, faster, more versatile,
more reliable than both Windows and Linux") general purpose OS marketed by a
well known big company.

All it needs is a full application suite to get it started and some
marketing. OS is like a language, nobody likes it unless it has a living
culture of users (=applications) around it.

I think the best license choice would be to distribute a shareware version
for a registration fee. Then you could sell various "professional" editions
with a higher price through various channels. Most of the source could be
made open, but not necessarily all has to. One interesting source code
licensing mode is the one used by Troll Tech which makes the Qt toolkit
which is used in Linux KDE environment: you can use the code freely in free
products, but it costs to use it in commercial software.

[9fans] Re: license terms?

[Barry]

[My $0.02]
    With respect to Lawyers, Licenses, Management, etc.  ... One Word:

Capitalism.

    Don't count on the Intellects, Wizards, whatever, to drive the market.
Pardon me if I seem cynical, but profit sustains all business. However, I still
would love to see an incarnation of Plan9 (that 20 years after the first Plan9
Beta) with the Popularity and Effectiveness that Unix (and associated flavors)
enjoys now.

[Note: I strongly support the concept of Capitalism, but not Machiavellian
(sp?) methods. Disclaimer: I am neither an Economic or Political Science
Major.]


==================================================================
  Once a proud programmer of Apple II computers, he now spends his days
     and nights in cheap dives fraternizing with exotic dancers.

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Douglas]

Tom,

That was a bit harsh.

There is a growing trend for research schools to patent their
discoveries, particularly in biotech. I would love to see you
convince some of _those_ lawyers to give away some of _those_ patents,
particularly when they bring millions of dollars into their
endowments. As your own sig says, "The hardest thing to see..."

Doug

Tom Glinos wrote:
>
> >it goes.  Please do not lobby us on the issue; it is beyond our
> >control, in the hands of corporate lawyers.
>
> That's a bit of a cop out. Unless lawyers are running the company, managment
> makes those decisions, lawyers just execute.
>
> --
> =================
> The hardest thing to see                | Tom Glinos @ U of Toronto Statistics
> is the way things REALLY are.           | tg@utstat.toronto.edu

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Douglas]

Tried that once for an old defunct product that would have been
a general interest item for embedded programming hobbyists.

You can try to run a crusade, or you can do the job that they
pay you to do. One action yields good performance reviews, the
other doesn't. Care to guess which is which?

I don't know about anybody else on this newsgroup, but I have a
mortgage to pay and a wife and two kids that depend on me for
an income. It isn't really that hard a priority call to make.

Doug

rob pike wrote:
>
> > That's a bit of a cop out. Unless lawyers are running the company, managment
> > makes those decisions, lawyers just execute.
>
> Lucent is a big company and the desires of a few researchers to give company
> software away do not pull much weight.

Helium comes to mind, and not much of it! ;-)

>
> -rob

[9fans] re: license terms?

[forsyth]

>> >it goes.  Please do not lobby us on the issue; it is beyond our
>>>control, in the hands of corporate lawyers.

>>That's a bit of a cop out. Unless lawyers are running the company, managment
>>makes those decisions, lawyers just execute.

i suspect that caused a few wry smiles.

[9fans] re: license terms?

[rob]

> That's a bit of a cop out. Unless lawyers are running the company, managment
> makes those decisions, lawyers just execute.

Lucent is a big company and the desires of a few researchers to give company
software away do not pull much weight.

-rob

[9fans] re: license terms?

[presotto]

You are entirely right.  Sufficiently high management can make the
lawyers do anything they want.  Unfortunately, noone above the lower levels of
research really cares one way or the other what happens to Plan 9.  The
lawyers, without pressure or coverage from someone with influence in
the company, have a tendency to cover their own backsides.  It's
their genitals on the chopping block should they let out something that
is later perceived as representing a major revenue loss for the company.

It's our job to convince the higher ups and the lawyers that releasing
plan 9 as free open source is in the company's best interest.  This time
around, Rob has spent the last six months lobbying up the management hierarchy and
pushing on the lawyers.  Other research management has been doing the
same for other projects.  It seems to be having results.  Please don't
flog a very tired horse.  The hill is steep and the cart heavy.

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Tom]

>it goes.  Please do not lobby us on the issue; it is beyond our
>control, in the hands of corporate lawyers.

That's a bit of a cop out. Unless lawyers are running the company, managment
makes those decisions, lawyers just execute.

-- 
=================
The hardest thing to see		| Tom Glinos @ U of Toronto Statistics
is the way things REALLY are.		| tg@utstat.toronto.edu

[9fans] re: license terms?

[Vladimir]

Hi 

Is there a chance to make available more
utilities with the PC DIST?
(I really miss the man command...)

You could put the binnaries somewhere for
download.

Thanks

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[9fans] re: license terms?

[rob]

I would be grateful if someone would tell ME what the license
for the next release is going to be.  One of the sticking points
at the moment is legal.  We're trying to do an open-source
release, but only time and lawyers will tell us if that's the way
it goes.  Please do not lobby us on the issue; it is beyond our
control, in the hands of corporate lawyers.

-rob

[9fans] re: license terms?

[gvwilson]

Hello.  I'm not a regular reader of this list, but would be grateful if
someone could tell me what the license for the next release is going to
be.

Thanks,
Greg Wilson
http://www.software-carpentry.com