Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

["Todd C. Miller" <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com>]

> The licence has been changed and I don't really understand the
> implications, except that the Open Source Institute blessed the
> penultimate version and declared it officially ``open source''.  See
> plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/nntemplate.html.  It might be worth
> pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if they are serious about
> using the Plan 9 C compilers.

Unfortunately, OpenBSD can't really use the compiler unless it has
a license similar to that used by MIT, UC Berkeley, or the ISC.
Our goals are quite different from the OSI; we favor licenses that
are both clear and concise (the text of our preferred license is
just 10 lines on an 80-column terminal) and, most importantly, that
don't require a lawyer to interpret.  Anything that creates a
tortious liability for us is simply not acceptable as we have no
financial means of defending ourselves.

As it stands, the new Lucent license is not something we can use.
This is unfortunate as continued development and expansion of the
plan9 toolchain is in the best interests of both the plan9 community
and the open source community at large.  It would mean development
of additional CPU targets that could be used to bootstrap ports of
plan9 to currently unsupported platforms.

 - todd