From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <87vgglujz7.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <20011108145513.B0E9B199F2@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] one reason ideas from Plan 9 didn't catch on Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 10:17:43 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1c1fd3b4-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 presotto@closedmind.org writes: > On Thu Nov 8 05:45:28 EST 2001, tb+usenet@becket.net wrote: > > > > There are some pretty big reasons that Plan 9's very good ideas are > > sitting in an eddy of the stream of OS design: because the political > > shenanigans of those who hold the keys have done their best to keep > > those ideas out of the mainstream. > > This is hatefully unfair. The shenanigans involve Rob spending months > fighting with lawyers to get a license as close to possible to the > model we originally gave them, i.e., ``do with it what you want, just don't > sue us if it breaks''. It's amazing to me how that became what it > did. However, its through no fault of Rob's, he got dragged kicking > and screaming all the way. You're pointing out that Rob Pike doesn't hold the keys. I'm speaking of the shenanigans of those who hold the keys. It may be unfair that the people who hold the keys won't let Plan 9 out, but it's still a fact that they do so. > I just reread the GPL. The main differences are indeed our 2 clauses > > 1) our license is one sided. We demand that, on request, modifications > are made available to Lucent if the modifications are otherwise > distributed. The GPL requires them to be made available to anyone. No, the GPL does not require them to be made available to anyone, with the sole exception of people who want to make binary-only distributions. For people who distribute source, you can distribute your changes to as few or as many people as you like > 2) our license limits lawsuits in too general a way. You can't sue > Lucent over intellectual property and keep the license. There's > nothing like this in the GPL. Instead it says that you can't > include anything in the code that might have IP implications. > Should you do so, you can't redistribute. The problem with #2 is a total disaster for free software. It amounts to "Lucent wants the right to violate any license on anything I write." > I think lucent has been very upright about (1), i.e., if you give it > to them, it gets redistributed. I have no idea about (2) since its > never come up when someone sued Lucent that I know of. Certainly if I do send a change back to Lucent, and it's a free software product, Lucent should have the right to distribute the change to other people. That's what freedom is. But the problem is that I shouldn't have to send the change back to Lucent. It might be very expensive for me to do so, for example. Now this clause is much better than those which mandate sending all changes back: it is only operative if Lucent actually asks for the change to be sent back. > In both cases the license is transitive. Does that have to > do with free or freedom? "free software" as I use it, and as all those people who are committed to it use it, is a fairly well-defined notion. The boundaries are sometimes fuzzy, but the Plan 9 license fails all of the tests out there (the FSF defn, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, the *BSD people, and so forth). > It does seem to mean that there is no monetary cost to obtaining, > using, and modifying the code other than the cost of copying it. That > pertains to both licenses. You've greatly misunderstood the GPL then. There is nothing about the GPL which prevents charging more than the cost of copying for getting a copy. The FSF itself charges significantly more than the cost of copying for a CD-ROM, and makes a tidy income from that trade. Thomas