[9fans] Re: Plan9 should be free distributable

[Jim Choate ravage@ssz.com]

On Sat, 13 May 2000, Digby Tarvin wrote:

> 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.

No? How about DR Dos, DesqView(X), 4Dos, Wine, etc. There have been at
least a half dozen efforts. Unfortunately everyone of them fell apart
(well other than Wine).

> 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'm more interested in keeping the OS alive then making sure a bunch of
engineers at Lucent stay on the payroll.

> 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..

Let's bash all commercial companies who keep technology they have no
interest or intent in developing closed licensed so others can't go
forward.

It's predatory.

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