From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "John S. Dyson" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit References: <20011108145513.B0E9B199F2@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] one reason ideas from Plan 9 didn't catch on Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 10:17:59 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1c338dd2-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 presotto@closedmind.org wrote in message news:<20011108145513.B0E9B199F2@mail.cse.psu.edu>... > On Thu Nov 8 05:45:28 EST 2001, tb+usenet@becket.net wrote: > > > > There are some pretty big reasons that Plan 9's very good ideas are > > sitting in an eddy of the stream of OS design: because the political > > shenanigans of those who hold the keys have done their best to keep > > those ideas out of the mainstream. > > This is hatefully unfair. The shenanigans involve Rob spending months > fighting with lawyers to get a license as close to possible to the > model we originally gave them, i.e., ``do with it what you want, just don't > sue us if it breaks''. It's amazing to me how that became what it > did. However, its through no fault of Rob's, he got dragged kicking > and screaming all the way. > > I just reread the GPL. The main differences are indeed our 2 clauses > > 1) our license is one sided. We demand that, on request, modifications > are made available to Lucent if the modifications are otherwise > distributed. The GPL requires them to be made available to anyone. > Firstly, I am NOT a fan of general purpose use of the GPL, but I must correct your impression under subtopic 1 above. You only have to give source code to those who you give binaries. There are limited uses (IMO) of the GPL, but it is NOT a license of free software in a traditional sense (e.g. give a friend the binaries that you built, but have lost the source, or cannot represent a reasonable pointer to the source.) John