From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2000 20:56:22 -0400 From: Alexander Viro To: Boyd Roberts cc: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] The problems of the Plan 9 license, by Richard Stallman In-Reply-To: <395FD216.D91B95E9@noos.fr> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Topicbox-Message-UUID: d209fc38-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Sun, 2 Jul 2000, Boyd Roberts wrote: > Pedro de-las-Heras-Quiros wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > Linux Today has published today an article by Richard Stallman where > > he explains "the problems" of the license of Plan 9 3rd ed: > > > > http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-07-02-007-04-OP-LF-SW > > > > stallman should a) take a bath, b) get a grip and c) stop writing > bullshit that he thinks is code. You mean he actually writes something these days? AFAICS he went 100% PHB... He has one point, though - part regarding the intellectual property actions, nice as it is, is abusable. And that has nothing to GPL, indeed - sufficiently malicious and smart asshole can use that clause to cause a lot of grief to any contributor. Doesn't have to be very smart, actually - AFAICS "contribution" != "contribution accepted into the official tree", so quality of code is not an issue and recipe is out there... s/any/& Plan 9-related/ would be one of the ways to close that hole, but anyway, hole is actually there. (For those who didn't bother to read the text in question, scenario basically boils down to the following: $EVIL_ASSHOLE becomes a contributor, picks a $VICTIM_CONTRIBUTOR and starts doing nasty things to any code written by $VICTIM_CONTRIBUTOR, quite possibly under different license, containing trade secrets, whatever. Oops...)