I've got to be more precise here, obviously. The license talks about two types of people (that can be the same of course); contributors and distributors. If you want what you wrote to be a contribution, you must affirmatively say it somewhere (like email to the Labs or 9fans containing the contribution or announcing it to the web). You are then a contributor and your contribution and you are protected by the license should anyone distribute it. A contributor also is required to provide source and required to provide a 'royalty free patent license...' to anyone that accepts the license. If you want to distribute something containing plan9 source or plan9 binaries you are a distributor (D). A distributor can distribute under a different license and doesn't have to disclose any source that it not a 'contribution'. However, D's license must be compatible with ours, i.e., must have similar cover your ass clauses (see the license for specifics, but I believe most OSI licenses would be satisfactory). Also, if the distribution is commercial (for recompense of some sort) the distributor must indemnify all contributors against suits brought as a result of actions taken by the distributor (false claims, bad software, malicious behavior, ...). If you link your code with our libraries and distribute, we have taken that not to be a distribution since the only people that can run it are somehow in the chain of licensee or distributor so that they would already have the libraries. If you don't want to trust us always being that nice, you can distribute your own object files without the libraries since the end user can link anyways. The salient point is that SOURCE YOU WRITE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE MADE PUBLIC unless you call it a contribution. So if you want to base something on Plan 9 (including hacking kernel and libraries) but don't want to give away your work, you can do so. However, if you want to make money off of it, you have to take financial responsibility for your actions.