On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Andy Elvey <andy.elvey@paradise.net.nz>wrote:

>  On 25/07/12 16:06, John Floren wrote:
> (snip)
>
> Just write the code, nobody cares. The manual pages define an interface,
> and you're going to implement it. The manual pages are copyrighted, sure,
> because they're written works and are automatically protected by copyright.
> Besides the recent Google vs. Oracle fiasco, I can't think of a time an
> open-source project had legal problems by writing new code to implement an
> API. And, based on a brief reading of
> http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf, it looks as though a US
> judge has ruled that an API is not subject to copyright; if you implement
> the 9P API, you should be fine. Also, since you're doing a free
> reimplementation of code which is currently available free to everyone by
> the creators (Lucent), I have a hard time figuring out exactly what basis
> they'd have for a lawsuit. john
>
> Hi John - thanks for that.
> Thanks also to everyone who has commented in this thread - you've been
> very helpful!  This is one of the most helpful lists that I've been on.
> This feedback is very useful as a guide to how to proceed.
>
> Although I'm not running Plan 9 at present (I'm on Linux), I'm very
> impressed with its elegance. Everything from kbdfs to the plumber to the
> Venti filesystem - it's all beautifully thought-out.  The way that Venti
> uses SHA1 hashes to store data reminds me a lot of Git (which I also really
> like - there's another elegantly designed bit of software).
> Thanks again, all - bye for now :)
> - Andy
>
>

Linux of course has v9fs which is a 9P implementation in the kernel.