Re: [9fans] The new ridiculous license

[Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>]

It's too difficult for me to explain in full details how much of this
license is not acceptable to us.  But it clearly is not acceptable to
us.

We have an entire operating system (minus a touch of GPL and LGPL here
and there, one sendmail license, and a few smatterings of Artistic)
that has NO CONTRACTS -- every license is simply "copyright law term
dismissal + warranty disclaimer".  That is free; these licenses make
no new requirements of anyone; they do not require or re-state
anything that is already the way it is.  The BSD licenses we have
simply take rights granted by copyright law to the author, and they
serve to allow the author to give up all of those rights (except the
copyright law right to be known as the author).  These licenses ask
for nothing in return; they do not even restate anything that another
law might make a problem -- because there is no need to state it!

We can't accept this license as it is. I note your meeting notes said
that a goal had been to allow OpenBSD to use parts from this (in
particular we were interested in the c compiler).  I think someone did
not listen to us, or understand what a BSD-licensed operating system
has as a goal -- as this is, the plan9 components are now no more free
for us to use than they were weeks ago.

sure; you have a new license.  That will be good for some people.  Too
bad it does not go far enough for the needs of a BSD licensed system.
It's just incompatible.  It would be the most onerous license in our
tree (well there is the GPL, but year by year we remove and replace
more and more GPL software in our tree... we had hoped to replace the
c compiler in the long term with a free one...)