Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)

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

Andrew Simmons <andrew.simmons@xtra.co.nz> writes:

> It is surely neither polite nor accurate to describe mr pike as stamping his
> foot and saying it isn't fair. I take him to have been expressing a sense of
> frustration and sadness with the doctrinaire and ungenerous attitude of the
> free software ultras. I mean, here you are able to obtain at no cost a
> fascinating and elegant operating system (although admittedly the omission
> of the "-v" flag from "cat" is odd), complete with source code and some of
> the best-written documentation around, and instead of thanking Lucent and
> the Plan 9 team for their astonishing generosity, you complain because the
> system does not satisfy your arcane definition of "free".

Except cost has *nothing to do with it*.  Whether it's hugely
expensive or they pay you to run it (negative cost), it's not relevant
to the definition I was using.  Whether the source is generally
visible is not relevant.  What is relevant is whether people have
certain freedoms.  If Lucent doesn't want people to have those
freedoms, then lots and lots of people aren't going to have interest
in hacking on it.  And why should they?  To improve Lucent's bottom
line?  To enable Lucent to steal software from other people by
ignoring the licenses on it?

I'm sorry that Rob feels miffed; he probably did the level best he
could.