Re: [9fans] one reason ideas from Plan 9 didn't catch on

[presotto@closedmind.org]

On Thu Nov  8 05:45:28 EST 2001, tb+usenet@becket.net wrote:
>
> There are some pretty big reasons that Plan 9's very good ideas are
> sitting in an eddy of the stream of OS design: because the political
> shenanigans of those who hold the keys have done their best to keep
> those ideas out of the mainstream.

This is hatefully unfair.  The shenanigans involve Rob spending months
fighting with lawyers to get a license as close to possible to the
model we originally gave them, i.e., ``do with it what you want, just don't
sue us if it breaks''.  It's amazing to me how that became what it
did.  However, its through no fault of Rob's, he got dragged kicking
and screaming all the way.

I just reread the GPL.  The main differences are indeed our 2 clauses

1) our license is one sided.  We demand that, on request, modifications
  are made available to Lucent if the modifications are otherwise
  distributed.  The GPL requires them to be made available to anyone.

2) our license limits lawsuits in too general a way.  You can't sue
  Lucent over intellectual property and keep the license.  There's
  nothing like this in the GPL. Instead it says that you can't
  include anything in the code that might have IP implications.
  Should you do so, you can't redistribute.

The first was intended to make sure Lucent got something back after
paying our salaries for years.  I beleive the more general form would
work for that too and the lawyers might be persuaded.

The second I doubt we can ever do anything about.  Lucent's lawyers don't
want Lucent being sued over stuff in the code.  Even though they didn't
make it more specific I expect that unless the IP involves the code that Lucent
released, it's not defensable.  I have to talk to an Avaya lawyer later
this week so maybe I can get an opinion.  Any of you lawyers out there?

I think lucent has been very upright about (1), i.e., if you give it
to them, it gets redistributed.  I have no idea about (2) since its
never come up when someone sued Lucent that I know of.

The question is, what does free mean?

It clearly doesn't mean the freedom of the contributor since any
licence fetters him in some way.  GPL doesn't let him distribute
changed binary without making the source available to everyone for
example.  It also seems to mean that you lose exclusive rights to
anything you embody in the code in the case of the GPL and that
you lose the ability to sue Lucent in the Plan 9 one.

In both cases the license is transitive.  Does that have to
do with free or freedom?

It does seem to mean that there is no monetary cost to obtaining,
using, and modifying the code other than the cost of copying it.  That
pertains to both licenses.

In these senses both licenses seem free to me, though the Plan 9
one seems lopsided in its fetters.