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Plan9 is now Officially Open Source
DrSkwid writes "The OSI have approved the revised license for the plan 9 operating system according to attendees returning from this year's Usenix Bof."
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It's not too shabby:
Plan 9 is designed around the basic principle that all resources appear as files in a hierarchical file system (namespace) which is unique to each process. These resources are accessed via a network-level protocol called 9P which hides the exact location of services from the user. All servers provide their services as an exported hierarchy of files.
Features
The dump file system makes a daily "snapshot" of the filestore available to users
Unicode character set support throughout the system
Advanced kernel synchronization facilities for parallel processing
ANSI/POSIX environment emulator (APE)
Plumbing, a language driven way for applications to communicate
Acme - an editor, shell and window system for programmers
Sam - a screen editor with structural regular expressions
Support for MIME mail messages and IMAP4
Security - there is no super-user or root, and passwords are never sent over the network
There is no god
Latest release notes
Download the source (Warning: requires identification--privacy advocates maybe be excluded here)
This is really great news for Linux. For too long we've been trapped in the out-moded hierarchical/graphical paradigm. Plan 9, with its revolutionary "factotum" and "secstore" structures, could really provide a breadth of fresh hair to the Linux kernal, putting it head and shoulders above Windows.
It is sooo coool. It is more than just a typical OS. Is is a distributed OS. Really. Not a cluster like you often think about. Before you look at the screen shots and say "boy, that looks crappy", read the design.
The reasons aren't obvious. I've seen this myth before, notably from Microsoft employees. The idea that you can be "infected" by simply looking at GPLd code is nonsense. The GPL explicitly covers only derived works of the code. If you looked at a GPLd algorithm and reimplemented it, somebody would have a hell of a time arguing in court that it was "derived". This is doubly the case for the vast majority of GPLd code, which is written by people who don't have huge piles of cash and who probably have a disdain for the legal system as well.
The idea that some random geek, or even a big company, is going to sue you on a legal platform as wobbly as "judge, he looked at it, so the rest of his work is clearly based on ours" is somewhere slightly above absolute zero and in any case applies just as equally to proprietary code, as the case of SCO shows.
Ironically, proprietary code is generally far more "infectious". I work on Wine - if I were to have seen the Windows code, I would be immediately banned from working on it, indeed, probably I'd be banned from working on most GPLd code. The EULA for Windows is extremely vague about such things, and Microsoft have armies of lawyers and it's quite feasable for them to sue me or others on a virtually non-existant legal basis. The reverse is not true.
I see that this post has been marked as a troll. I'm not sure it was, but this FUD should not be propogated any further regardless.
It's Bell Lab's design for the successor to Unix, learning from Unix's successes and failures.
Instead of everything being a file, everything's a file system. Instead of processes communicating through pipes, everything communicates through plumbing (like a cross between pipes and an email system).
It's tiny, coherent, and elegant. I really hope we see more of it.
-Billy
While researching cluster software for my current project, I read some whitepapers showing the differences between Plan 9, Beowulf, Mosix and others. I recommend that read.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
"What would really be cool is if some of the GUI concepts made it over to Linux..."
They already have. Have a look at these:
9wm - a window manger that acts like 8 1/2 from Plan 9
Wily - a clone of Plan 9s programmers editor, Acme (v cool)
There's also WindowLab, another window manager which uses the same window resizing system as Plan 9.
I'm sure there's more that I don't know of...
Our web server and FTP server serve the same files. /hidden is the exception to the rule, meaning that you can't list that directory using the FTP server (or the web server). We use it for things we don't want people stumbling upon. The license files were kept there when we were doing the initial OSI approval, and we just haven't moved them yet.
I worked on this license. It is NOT viral.
It's basically the IBM license but changed not to be viral. Contributions must be covered by the same license, but that only applies if you declare your changes to be a Contribution.
If you want to take the code and go work on a closed project, no problem.