From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theo de Raadt Message-Id: <200306171652.h5HGqLEw016681@cvs.openbsd.org> To: rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com Subject: Re: [9fans] The new ridiculous license Cc: 9fans@cse.psu.edu, deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:52:21 -0600 Topicbox-Message-UUID: cc1facac-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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...)