[9fans] Re: Plan9 should be free distributable

[Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org]

> 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).

None of these are Windows or NT clones. They are eather failed DOS
clones or subsystems which attempt to allow Windows API applications to
run on another operating system.

I certainly would not count Linux as a Windows clone, Wine or not...

And the reason there are no clones is that Microsoft don't
release their source, keep the interfaces a moving target, and
have an army of lawyers ready to pounce on anyone that puts a foot
wrong.

Threats to 'give it away or we will steal it' are the sort of thing
that can convince management to follow a similar closed strategy,
and put a stop to cheap source and free downloads.

> > 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.

I am sorry to hear that you do not think the people that created Plan9
deserve any reward for their efforts. It seems people only want to
give money to writers of poor operating systems.

The free software movement has a good record of being able to
duplicate good ideas, like Unix and 'C', but so far the invention
of these ideas has required commercial investment for which there
has been little enough return.

So I am more interested in seeing the group that produced Unix and
Plan9 survive to produce the next great system than trying to
force them to treat the software industry as a charity they
should donate their time to.

> > 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.

I do not understand your definition of predatory.

To me being predatory involves taking something away, not failing
to give something away.

Lucent has done the industry a great service by making the ideas
available. So long as they don't prevent you from writing your
own code, I can see no cause to complain.

To take someone's code away from them because you don't think they
are making enough use of it would seem to be predatory.

If Lucent gave away the software, it would be very magnanamous of
them, but I don't think they have any moral responsibility to
do so unless they were publicly funded or had been found guilty
of using it to illegally monopolistically dominate the software
industry.

I see it as being similar to the biotech industry, where I don't
object to company's that do the research keeping the information
they discover proprietory so that can profit from it. But I do
object to giving them the ability to establish patents that prevent
competitors from discovering the same thing independently....

Anyway, as someone has already observed, it is unlikely that
anyone in a position to make such decisions would be reading
this list, so this is just an philosophical discussion that
is distracting us from more interesting technical questions...

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