Re: [9fans] Is the vanilla Plan 9 still alive?

[David Butler <gdb@dbsystems.com>]

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9fans,

First let me agree that 9legacy.org <http://9legacy.org/> is the best destination for this thread, is there a living “vanilla" Plan9. And by “vanilla” I’m talking about what was released and maintained by AT&T / Lucent / Alcatel, to the end, on January 2015. I applaud the strategy of separating the patches from the base code because it help clarify license issues. It leaves it to the user of the code to resolve each patch’s ownership, accepting those you can get reasonable license terms from and rejecting those that you can’t. Look at the very last paragraph of http://www.9legacy.org/patch.html <http://www.9legacy.org/patch.html>. David du Colombier explicitly provides a license for his patches. But leaves all other submissions to the author. For example, I don’t see a similar grant from another frequent patch supplier, Erik Quanstrom. For interesting complexities, look at patch http://www.9legacy.org/9legacy/patch/upas-nfs-p9p.diff <http://www.9legacy.org/9legacy/patch/upas-nfs-p9p.diff>. It was supplied by Russ Cox that says “This port is the work of David du Colombier with contributions from Justin Bedo.” What is the license grant?

As you can imagine, so goes every other Plan9 based code. As a result, none of them are a good place to start, nor continue. I won’t bore you with the details of my attempt to get reasonable license terms (you can research the 9fans messages from many years ago), but corporate lawyers kill great software.

The situation was finally resolved in February 2014 when The University of California, Berkeley received permission to release Plan9 under GPLv2. (http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/news.php <http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/news.php>). From that page you can download the distribution here <http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/files/plan9.tar.bz2> or clone it from the git repo <https://github.com/brho/plan9>. Dislike GPL all you like, but it provides one, very fundamental, feature lacking in almost every other “free” software license. The license is in force by reading. There is no chase to figure out if a patch submitter granted a compatible license. Or even if they have the right to! (You may be surprised what you have to get your corporate employer to agree to in this regard.)

So, IMHO, all future work on Plan9 should be applied to the GPLv2 release. Yes, orphaning all other Plan9 progress. They are only good for hobby use. If you ever want to use Plan9 for profit, it better be based on the GPLv2 code.

David Butler

> On Nov 24, 2019, at 11:07 AM, David du Colombier <0intro@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Actually, you know what, I should put my money
>> where my mouth is. Would there be objections to
>> me going through and fixing the links in the
>> wiki so they point to 9p.io?
> 
> This is a good idea. Let me know how do you want to proceed.
> 
>> Is there anyone who would be comfortable explaining
>> to me exactly the relationship between 9p.io and
>> 9legacy, as well as how people are expected to use
>> the two, so that I can put that into the wiki?
> 
> 9p.io is a mirror of the former Bell Labs website.
> 
> We're still accepting patches and people can
> update their contrib directory. However, the
> rest is mostly read-only.
> 
> 9legacy is the latest Plan 9 from Bell Labs sources
> (2015-01-10) with addition of a few hundreds patches.
> It's regularly updated.
> 
>> Is there anywhere that people would be comfortable
>> blessing as a source for building new ISO images,
>> to put behind the download link, with the accepted
>> patches integrated?
> 
> That's mostly what 9legacy is.
> 
> -- 
> David du Colombier
> 
> ------------------------------------------
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