[9fans] Plan9 should be free distributable

[Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org]

>
> The plan9 technology is amazing and if it doesn't become freely available it will be cloned and we will
> start an open plan9 distribution, there might be patent issues but only in the USA... Software patents
> are not enforced everywhere, they are abusive and void.
>
You are of course at liberty to give your own work away free, but I
can't see your justification for insisting that others do the same.

There is nothing to stop you or anyone else starting a new Linux
like effort to reimplement the Plan9 ideas. But I don't think you
should advocate stealing someone else's code.

In your arguments, you seem to ignore the fact the the most popular
(and vastly inferiour) operating system on the market costs quite
a lot more than Plan9, and I don't see hordes of "NT/Windows" clones
out there because of it.

Of course the price comparison is not quite fair, because Windows
source versions are not available, and software development tools
are all optional extras.

I could see an argument for makeing an Intel/Binary Plan9 CD available
at a much lower price, for students or others just wanting
to evaluate it or perhaps develop applications and bundle them with
a running binary system.  You don't need system source to develop
applications.

Personally I am more than happy to pay US$350.00 for a source licence,
if that contributes to keeping the very talented people at Lucent
able to keep working.

I would also be quite happy to see a freely distributed clone
developed, based only on the ideas and not the source code of the
current implementation. But I would not expect the resulting kernel
to be as elegantly written as the original, which is why I would
rather keep it in the hands of the original authors. If it did go
open source, I would prefer the BSD to the Linux model for that
reason.

An ugly application can be ignored, but an ugly kernel hack can
damage reliability and maintainability, and make subsequent
improvements more difficult.

So long as any potential clone maintained application binary
compatibility with the original, both could benefit from a vibrant
developer community.

Lucent is a commercial company, so lets not bash them too much for
trying to stay in business. They may not be helping as much as
some of us think they could, but at least they are not actually
doing great harm like a certain Redmond based company..

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk