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

[Andrew Simmons <andrew.simmons@xtra.co.nz>]

<RANT>
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".

I would however mildly disagree with mr pike in his choice of the splits in
the Christian churches as the most apt comparison with the free software
community. To my mind, a better parallel is with the various Judaean
liberation groups in "Monty Python's Life of Brian". The similarity between
the odium heaped on "splitters" by the Judaean People's Liberation Front (or
was it the People's Front for the Liberation of Judaea?), and the odium
heaped on "forkers" by the various free software factions is uncanny.
</RANT>

>
> And the people who might work on Plan 9 but don't, because they are
> committed to free software, are committed to the libre definition, not
> the gratis one.  Stamping your foot and saying it isn't fair won't
> change that.