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."

Comments

How long until?

[rkz]

How long until SCO claim that SCO IP was stolen and put into plan9?

Re:How long until?

[thoolihan]

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

More information

[PhysicsGenius]

Screenshot
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.

DAMMIT

[hatrisc]

dammit.. another operating system to try out.... and only 2 computers.

excellent

[Boromir son of Faram]

This is great news for the Open Source community. While Plan9 is often rediculed as being outdated, it no doubt has its share of novel and useful algorithms, which may now be incorporated into more mainstream open source OSes such as Linux and the HURD (yes, it's still around).

Open sourcing OS code has proven to be a good way to keep ailing systems relevant in the current marketplace. It kept BeOS and VMS from dying in obscurity, and even helped BSD limp along for a few more years.

I predict nothing but good things from GNU/Plan9. Hopefully Debian will introduce a Plan9 distro, to go with their Darwin, HURD, and Linux distrii. I still have a few spare boxen lying around that I could use this on.

Long term, does this mean anything?

[Jack William Bell]

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...

Re:Viral or free?

[IamTheRealMike]

If it's one of the viral types I don't want to accidently look at any of the code for obvious reasons.

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.

Re:FSF take?

[the morgawr]

You do know that that's talking about the OLD lisence right? A quick search of the page for those pharses would have told you that.

It seems that this rewrite was an attempt to address Richard's concerns. That said I think some of these issues may still be valid, but IANAL.

Re:Open Source, only in US and Canda

[russcox]

This is NOT true.

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.