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Bell-Labs Releases New Version Of Plan 9
F2F writes "Plan 9 from Bell Labs Fourth Release was announced yesterday marking a major overhaul of the entire operating system. VMware images are now supported, together with hoards of new hardware. The operating system now sports a new security model (on top of the old one, which was already quite secure), new network-resident secure storage system and improvements in the thread library, among others. See the release notes here: release4 notes or simply go to the download page at: plan9 download." T. adds: erikdalen sent in these links to critiques of the Plan 9 license from Richard Stallman and Nathan Myers.
The problems with the Plan9 licence generally do not bother much of the developers, even though occasionaly flamefests erupt on the plan9 mailing lists.
According to the people at Bell Labs, if the Lucent lawyers agree, Plan9's licence could immediately be changed to something more in terms with RMS' revolution.
Unfortunately those same lawyers have been petitioned quite so many times already.
don't use their code.
When people are offering you something for free, it's pretty rude to complain that they're not offering you even more.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Now I can go confuse all my marginally OS-literate coworkers and friends, and be amused while they try to sort out OS 9, Plan 9, and MacOS9...
The entertainment possibilities are endless.
Plan9 has some really cool ideas, the more Unix than Unix everything-as-a-file paradigm, the network transparent file system, directory merging, the list goes on and on.
But I just can't get past the mouse-intensive UI. I absolutely hate it.
Funny, last time I heard about Plan 9, it involved turning humans into zombies to take over the world. Guess plans really change when the R and D department is cut.
Plan 9 has the best OS mascot ever.
The goatse guy for president. Win one for the gaper!
RMS argued that the bit about "all your modifications are belong to us" was really denying you the rights he finds important. I beg to differ.
By the looks of things, there's no restriction on you modifying the gode, with the exception that you must make your modifications available to the company. This would be sort of like forcing everyone who hacks the linux kernel to send in patches, which could be a useful thing to do. But there's no restriction on people messing with the code in the first place.
I'm not saying this software is free by Stallman's definition, but perhaps this is not quite as bad as he makes it out to be.
OS competition, if nothing else, motivates everyone to write better software (unless you're a monopolist, but we won't get into that). As a linux partisan, I say "Bring it on"
I am officially gone from
One of RMS's criticisms of the Plan 9 lisence is that:
Plane 9 lisence: Distribution of Licensed Software to third parties pursuant to this grant shall be subject to the same terms and conditions as set forth in this Agreement,
RMS: This seems to say when you redistribute you must insist on a contract with the recipients, just as Lucent demands when you download it.
The GPL states that: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
So, it seems to me that RMS is criticising Plan 9's lisence for doing exactly the same thing as the GPL does. Can you say hypocrite, Richard?
I think you should re-read what plan9 is all about. It's not about everything-is-a-file. That's unix.
Plan9 is in no way unix.
It tried (and succeeded) to do several things.
Plan9 removes the distinction between operating system, library, and application. These are things that an OS researcher cares about but a user doesn't.
So if you are developing plan9 apps, you *never* worry about the actual hardware. You worry about the program itself. The systems guys can map it to whatever hardware they want later.
You create your own personal computing environment the way you like it, and that environment can be mapped onto whatever sized plan9 installation you find later.
Yes.. it makes everything a file, or more accurately, every resource has a name in a tree-like structure. (not so much that everything is a file but a file is just another resource).
communications between resources is via a standard protocol (9p) that can be networked.
A system like you are proposing COULD go on top of plan9. That's more of a programming level thing than an OS level thing.
The thing is, plan9 offers no real benefit to a single user on a single computer. Running plan9 on your laptop is of no real use.
Running plan9 on your laptop because you are developoing apps that will ultimately run on the globe-wide corporate plan9 system.. that's where plan9 excels, because the little namespace you construct on your laptop.. when you plug your laptop into the global network, you can re-map your cpus for a given application to the supercomputing cluster in shanghai, the storage vault in the Caymans, and the 12 gig removable drive on the workstation next to you, and the application you wrote sees nothing different at all.
What about out-right confusion? (There IS a difference!)
SIG: HUP
From the license:
You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.
Stallman's point:
This prohibits modifications for private use, denying the users a basic right
I'm not 100% sure I see his point. If you make use of the code for any purpose, and Lucent asks you for the changes you made, you have to give it to them. IANAL, but it seems that they just want to be able to see all changes that get made.
The rest of RMS's points make sense, and this clause:
The licenses and rights granted under this Agreement shall terminate automatically if (i) You fail to comply with all of the terms and conditions herein; or (ii) You initiate or participate in any intellectual property action against Original Contributor and/or another Contributor.
is truly awful. See the link from Nathan Myers for a well written explanation of just how bad this is.
Zapman
It is unacceptable for a license to require compliance with US export control regulations. Laws being what they are, these regulations apply in certain situations regardless of whether they are mentioned in a license; however, requiring them as a license condition can extend their reach to people and activities outside the US government's jurisdiction, and that is definitely wrong. The Export Administration Regulations refer to export from the US. So, if you're not in the US, and aren't exporting from the US, this term simplifies to, "Space intentionally left blank". Anyone who dislikes this term should take things up with the US government, not Lucent. Lucent just doesn't want to get in trouble with the .gov.
I'm no font nerd, but I imagine the group creating the software are completely unrelated to the creators of the font. Also, aside from the fact that code and font data can both be stored on a computer, what has the GPL got to do with copyright terms on fonts? IANAL, but if you sell something for profit (say you're Boeing selling an aeroplane) which uses components from another manufacturer (say Rolls Royce), then your client doesn't sue Rolls Royce if the plane falls out of the sky, but Boeing. If ya don't like it, put in a NO WARRANTIES clause. What software doesn't? Errr, "contributors shall have". That's any contributor. Not just Lucent. Which is exactly what the GPL provides, no?there is no security through obscurity
Then why do you hide your email address?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Huh? Do you even understand the conversation?
The only thing that could mark you more clueless, would be if you started touting Windows.NET as the true modern OS.
No it doesn't. Take a look at Symbolics Genera, which is (was) the operating system of the Symbolics Lisp machines. It deviates massively from the UNIX-notion of files and character streams for everything.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
unfortunate thing is that security is only as strong as your weakest link
That's true if you use a "everybody inside can do everything, nobody outside can do anything" model of security. If you can set up security properly, one dumb and careless user would allow an attacker to do no more nor less than that dumb and careless user should be doing anyway.
So you want to change it from a namespace to an object space. That would work.. but you still need some form of communication between objects that can be abstracted over the network. Bytestreams anyone?
Putting objects on top of this would be no more kludgy than putting them on top of the underlying architecture. Bytestreams reflect reality.
IF you want to design a system that can utilize hardare the way plan9 does and use objects instead.. how would it work? Probably very similar to plan9
You can. But that's a drastically simplified way of doing things.
Sure, we can make drive F: just about anything these days, or we can network mount / to anything we want.
In plan9, every application works within a private namespace. Resources in that namespace can be mapped to anything, easily. It's not just about getting the files from somewhere else. it's about using different memory, processors, etc.
It's like symlinking EVERYTHING.. even all your devices.. but that doesn't even really cover it.
It's more than that.
It's not about platform independence.. it's about moving from a small scale system like a laptop to an absolutely huge-scale system like nothing you've ever seen before. It's about looking at resources.
From a developer (or user) point of view.. everything in plan9 is an abstraction.
A window has the same properties as a native screen. Keyboard input is identical everywhere.
It's not about processor-architecture independent code actually. Code still has to be built for the proper platform. (it can be re-built with absolutely zero modification, however)
It's about re-mapping any kind of resource somewhere else at will. It's about scaling up to huge systems.
It's not just about code that can run anywhere.. it's more like, you sit at your workstation and run some code. It runs locally.. everything is local except say part of your namespace which is the equivalent to a networked home directory for your project. Then you want the project to run somewhere else... so you run another clone of it, but this time you adjust the namespace for the app to use the big CPU cluster rather than your desktop. Everything looks and feels the same, exactly. Your workstation coudl be at home, or on your boat even.
With java, sure you can move stuff around, upload it elsewhere, run it elsewhere..
with plan9 you can basically run a huge collection of computers as one big computer with lots of different resources.
Or to quote (or probably mis-quote) something from the plan9 site..
Instead of building a system out of lots of little Unixes, we build an OS out of lots of little systems.
You look at a plan9 installation as one giant computer with resources, not as lots of independent computers that can communicate with each other.
the problem is that he tells other people not to download the code because he doesn't like the license.
The Plan 9 License has changed since RMS registered his complaints about it.
The "agree to provide" clause no longer says "if used for any purpose" but rather "if distributed in any form, e.g., binary or source". This is basically what the GPL does too.
The "reasonable charge" clause is followed by a sentence that says you can charge whatever you want for products or services you've added.
I suggest that if you're not interested in Stallman's comments, don't bother reading them. He didn't put out an ad campaign, he just put a comment on his website. You sought his advice and you recieved it. He's not forcing you to do anything.
I may or may not agree with him, but I agree that he has a right to put his opinion on his organization's website.
Mathematically proven to be totally secure and also bug free?
Secure. Proving something bug-free is very difficult, but is an area of intense research.
You said it yourself. Not 100% bug free...now wich is it? What is this golden OS that is bug free and TOTALLY secure, yet isn't totally secure or bug free. Maybe you should have read your paragraph again?
Why don't you think about it a little more yourself? I'll give you a hint: bug != security hole (necessarily). Only in poorly designed operating systems does a bug allow exploits. The very severe bugs may cause some degree of compromise even in secure systems, but if the security model is sound, the breach is always isolated.
Anyway...if it was 100% 'secure', wouldn't that make it immune to attacks? [...]
Be careful with your assumptions.
secure:
1: free from fear or doubt
2: free from danger or risk
3: kept safe or defended from danger or injury or loss
4: remote from any source of danger
5: not likely to fail or give way
6: able to withstand attack
Only one of the above refers to resilience against attacks. There are always attacks that cannot be protected against (ie. DOS attacks), but we can make the system reliable enough to not buckle and fail, and which will not be compromised under these attacks. That's security.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
no, i can't do what you suggest to me, even if i wanted to: it is not easy to not pay attention to stallman -- he's got that 'in your face' attitude that's hard to avoid.
---
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 20:42:45 -0600 (MDT)
From: Richard Stallman
To: presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com
Subject: Plan Nine deep-sixed by non-free license
Reply-to: rms@gnu.org
I was excited to hear that Plan Nine might become free software, but it turns out that the license is too restrictive to qualify. We will have to urge people not to use the Plan Nine software under its present license.
---
that said, you can now possibly see the point in my original comment. and no, i'm not dave presotto, i'm quoting this out of comp.os.plan9, where people like you often visit to share their views of what's free software and what's not.