Re: [9fans] one reason ideas from Plan 9 didn't catch on

["Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+usenet@becket.net>]

"T. Kurt Bond" <tkb@tkb.mpl.com> writes:

> I'd just like to emphasize that this part of the Plan 9 license seems
> to have changed since Richard Stallman first wrote the article.  Now
> the Plan 9 license says:

This is better, but unfortunately still not quite good enough, I
think.  The problem again is that people might want to distribute
privately, and not have a positive obligation to send copies to
Lucent.  (Whether the recipients of those copies choose to send
something out is their business.)

There seems to be a great fear that private modifications will somehow
take off, and Lucent would get left out of the loop, and not get to
benefit from all the nifty work that would be done.  That's a
reasonable fear; it's exactly the reason the GPL exists.  A copyleft
has the practical effect of allowing you to get changes back almost
always, without actually infringing on freedoms to do it.

A license like the BSD or X Consortium license, by contrast, does
indeed tend to encourage private modifications that never get rolled
back into the original source base, because it's possible with those
licenses to create non-free private modifications.

If the clause were changed into a request instead of a requirement,
it would be no problem at all.

The real killer, of course, is the "you promise never to sue Lucent
for any IP thing" clause.  That's so awful by itself that it dwarfs
the other problems in the license.

I know that Rob Pike and the others who pressured Lucent to make the
code as free as it is were trying to make it more available and to
make it free software.  But the result seems as if they weren't really
aware of what the community actually wants in free sofware, and so
they failed to extract from the lawyers what would actually work.

If there's another go round with the Lucent lawyers (and I certainly
hope there will be), it might be useful to invite Eric Raymond or
someone else of that ilk to help with the process to avoid this kind
of problem.