Re: [9fans] The new ridiculous license

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

> > Otherwise, what's your point by sending this garbage to 9fans?  If
> > you've got a problem with Bell Labs, take it up with them.  Don't spam
> > the rest of us with your misunderstandings of the community's goals.
>
> The whole point of the mail is:
>
> (1) It would be very nice to have the plan9 toolchain replace gcc
>     in the Unix world.
>
> (2) Step (1) will probably only happen if the License is much
>     more liberal than the gcc license, e.g. an ISC or BSD style license.
>
> Nobody is forcing you to do (2), especially if you don't care about (1).

At the end of the day, the only people who *really* can change the
license are the people at Lucent's legal department.  Perhaps they can
get pushed and proded in the appropriate direction by folks in 1127,
but ultimately it's the lawyers who decide.  It would be far more
profitable to take it up with them, perhaps first approaching someone
like Dave Presotto with a rationally communicated set of issues and
suggested solutions.  Sending rants filled with insults to a group of
people who mostly don't care at this level of specificity, and who
can't do anything about it anyway, is just a waste of everyone's time.

> So (1) might not be the "community"'s goal, but could do a favour to
> rest of the world outside of the "community".

If the BSD Unix crowd put as much effort into writing their own
compilers as they put into the sort of posturing we saw yesterday,
they'd have had their own compilers years ago.  Why is it strictly
necessary to use the Plan 9 compilers?  Why not just write your own?
It shouldn't take more than a couple months of work, really.

Besides, there *are* BSD licensed compilers out there already.

	- Dan C.