Re: [Vision for new platform] syslog, sed, cron

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 08:23:02AM -0400, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 05:33:34PM +0800, orc wrote:
> > (Why anyone who uses Plan9 needs gnu tools?)
> 
> To build python, of course.  How else can we access mercurial?
> 
> Rich,  how many licenses will this platform require?

Good question. Again, the intent is not to impose policy
unnecessarily, so in cases where there are two or more implementations
of a standard utility that meet the common extension needs of
applications, any of them can be used at the system integrator or
distributor's discression. This mostly covers the standard utilities
but maybe not all the higher-level stuff where there may only be one
implementation of the software needed.

I suspect some users may prefer to have a fully BSD/MIT/permissive
userspace, for either ideological or misguided corporate policy
reasons. While misguided, at least the latter have something to do
with deployment and adoption, so it would be nice to have a complete
functional system with all the components we mentioned originally
under a permissive license, but I don't think having some significant
components under a different free license, at least initially, is a
show-stopping problem. Platform should excel on technical merits like
size, power consumption, etc. and usability merits like interface, not
on holier-than-thou attitudes about licenses...

Rich