Re: [9fans] licence question

[ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>]

"Why do you think p9f asked for a relicensing of plan9 while it was
already gpl licensed a few years ago ? Both are redistributable but
the MIT version is also usable for closed source commercial projects
while the GPL version is not. Does this matter ? Yes of course it
matters for people or companies. Its sometimes amusing to see
developers taking legal issues lightly."

A little historical note here, speaking as the person who got both
those releases done.

The late jmk and I labored over a period of many months in 2013 to get
Plan 9 out under a BSD license. In the end, the copyright holder at
that time required that we distribute it, via UC Berkeley, under the
GPL. No choice. It was that or nothing. Those negotiations involved
many people, and it almost did not happen at all.

The p9f process was not a relicensing, it was a transfer of ownership
of the code.  One condition of the transfer, was that the GPL was
explicitly named as a license we should not use. All agreed that the
MIT license was a good one.

So it's not really correct to say anyone asked for a relicensing to
this or that specific license. The choice of license was always under
the control of whoever owned Bell Labs, and the code base, at that
time.

ron

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 4:10 PM hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> even if it won't be used, it can still serve as example. there's sense
> in that for some people.
>
> there aren't many real-world products/solutions based on plan9, so
> people who are interested to learn from others don't have so much
> choice.
> every addition can be potentially useful for somebody in the community.
> no harm done generally, as long as you give no false hopes...
>
> as i said, users tend to find unexpected, unintended ways of making
> use of things.
>
> On 1/30/22, ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote:
> > What I meant was that there is no sense in sharing the code for a special
> > purpose kiosk app.
> >
> > For people who are interested search for
> >
> > gpl infringement tv boxes
> >
> > You will find many examples of companies who took gpl too lightly and got
> > sued by FSF. The more users a product has which used GPL without making the
> > code available the higher the risk gets that they get sued. FSF isn't as
> > weak as many think they are.

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