From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Andrew Simmons Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20011108124931.AAB4119A08@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?) Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 10:34:05 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1efb338a-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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. > > 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.