Re: [9fans] Plan 9 technical docs and man pages - licensed or "public domain"?

[John Floren <john@jfloren.net>]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Andy Elvey <andy.elvey@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> Hi Andrey - thanks for your reply!
>
> On 25/07/12 14:47, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
>
> I'm not a lawyer but I play one in comedy clubs. The first
> implementation of 9p came about long before Plan 9 had a free (as in
> rms) license. Nobody got sued, nobody died, although a few bystanders
> were maimed.
>
> Interesting. It's good to find out a bit of the history behind 9p.
>
> My advice as your lawyer [in comedy] would be to go nuts and do
> whatever you want. The documentation[1] is a good place to start if
> you don't want to look at any source (no license required to see
> that!), and if you want to cover all corner cases, a running Plan 9
> kernel is a good client/server to test against.
>
> ----
> 1: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/5/INDEX.html
>
> Thanks for that!  I'll check that page out too.
> Btw - I clicked on the "copyright" link at the bottom, but the link is dead
> - nothing but a 404 page error.
>
> In looking at Tim Newsham's P9.py, he has a comment in the code - "9P
> protocol implementation as documented in plan9 intro(5) and <fcall.h>."
> ( I would likely be even more cautious and avoid looking at any header files
> if possible. )
> Thanks again, Andrey - you've been very helpful!
> - Andy

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