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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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I know you're kidding, but this brings up an interesting question. IIRC, Dennis Ritchie worked on Plan 9. He also wrote the original Unix at Bell Labs. If he wrote certain functions similarly (as one would expect him to reuse code snippets he had successfully written before), could there be intellectual property issues. Could a company in SCO's position claim that he has to completely avoid writing anything that similar to the code he wrote for a previous company?
Just a thought...
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
After the QNX thread a bit ago, this is probably the best news possible. Plan 9 is a nicely evolved version of UNIX, it is very scaleable, and 'orthogonal' (you can run a new version of the window manager in a window in the old one!).
If there ever was a viable alternative to the monolithic unices then Plan 9 is probably it.
Macro kernels are pretty much like turtles and sharks, very well adapted to living today, but dinosaurs nonetheless. Let's give this one the attention it deserves and see how it stacks up against the 'hurd', time to evolve !
MP3 Search Engine
My first subject line was 'Cool', but then I changed it. Why? Well, I have been interested in Plan 9 for a long time. I especially like the services-based architecture. In many ways it is a project with an awful lot of potential. But...
Problem 1: What is it good for? Right now Plan 9 has no compelling applications and a dearth of the applications most people use daily. This might be fixed soon as people port things like OpenOffice to it, but don't hold your breath.
Problem 2: It is a research tool, and may never be more than that. Chances are, any truly compelling features in Plan 9 will soon find their way into Linux and even MS Windows.
Problem 3: Overcoming the installed base. It took Linux nearly ten years to achieve name recognition, and it still is running a distant third on the desktop. What does Plan 9 offer that would make me, or you, want to spend time installing and learning it? Especially considerint Problem 2 and Problem 1.
Problem 4: Wrong direction. In my opinion the real important projects right now are ones that are removing the distinctions between OSs. Cross platform tools like Python, Chandler, Mono and Mozilla. Using standards-based DHTML as the UI. Why add another platform to the mix when the real goal is to become platform agnostic?
It all sums up to the same issues that squeak smalltalk has: Everything about it is great, but no-one uses it for anything real.
Of course all these problems I describe are based on my opinions, needs and preferences. Your mileage may vary. But I be most people's won't...
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Was the Plan9 license ever changed? I know for a while the FSF had a page listing the reasons why they don't consider Plan 9 a "free" OS regardless of the openess of it's source (blah blah, difference between open and free, blah blah, speech, blah blah, gratis).
...so basically I'm too lazy to use the internet to answer my questions... please find answers for me slashdot!
I think it'd be really great if Plan9 were released under a more "free" license.
John Fogerty sued for sounding like John Fogerty!
Fortunately, he won that case, but who knows how a similar case in the computer industry would turn out?
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
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.
While it is nice that the new license conforms to the requirements of the Open Source folks, that does not mean it is compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) under which Linux is written. Indeed, not even all free software licenses are compatibel with the GPL (though the vast majority certainly are), and as yet I have not been able to find any commentary from the FSF on whether the modified license qualifies as "free", much less is GPL compatible (the old one certainly wasn't, as RMSes comments posted to this thread quite definitely explain).
So, before getting too excited about Plan 9's potential contribution to Linux, we need to first find out whether or not the licenses are even compatible, so that code can be shared between the two projects.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
We do IP address checks to make sure you're in a country that the U.S. allows us to export crypto to, and that is all.
There's occasionally talk on LKML of using 9P, the universal Plan9 protocol, in Linux.
9P is the filing protocol, but *everything* in Plan9 is a file, so it's a universal protocol. It allows you to do things like nest devince namespaces, so you can have windowing systems inside windowing systems without any extra work.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
This is a huge deal, it is a real object-oriented system interface. All these proponents of COM and Corba and .net and all that other wannabe stuff should pay attention: "object oriented" is meaningless unless the "methods" match between the objects so they can be substituted for each other. Plan9 does this (so did original Unix before they added ioctl and sockets). In Plan9 all objects have "read" and "write" methods (and a few others) and can be reused. Now some people will scoff and say that that is not the type of methods they want on their objects, but they fail to realize that if they build their methods atop these they will be able to reuse any of the base objects. The files also provide a usable method of copying an object from one point to another that respects the actual size of these objects and the fact that executable code typically does not work on any machine other than the one it was supposed to be on.