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Plan 9 From Bell Labs Operating System Now Available Under GPLv2
TopSpin writes "Alcatel-Lucent has authorized The University of California, Berkeley to 'release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.' Plan 9 was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 has subsequently emerged as Inferno, a commercially supported derivative, and ports to various platforms, including a recent port to the Raspberry Pi. In Plan 9, all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user interface, are represented through the file system rather than specialized interfaces. The system provides a generic protocol, 9P, to perform all communication with the system, among processes and with network resources. Applications compose resources using union file systems to form isolated namespaces."
Unimpressed.
I was involved in the genesis of no less than 5 major open source projects and 7 not so major. License is always a political thing. It has benefitted Samba, benefitted Linux less, Benefitted Hurd not at all, and benefitted Apache, OpenLDAP, and the BSD's to varying degrees.
If they wanted to displace Mach in Hurd, they would have GPLv3'ed it (or done a "GPLv2 or later thing) so RMS could play daddy. They didn't. They're not going to displace Linux, which is the poster boy of GPL through v2, and therefore of the GNU-maniffesto-before-ut-oh-service-requires-patent-licenses realization took place.
This pretty much is not going to mean anything, other than they get to play Pontius Pilate and wash their hand of an inconvenient project going nowhere fast, while looking like a good guy.
Using GPLv2 in this case accomplishes no political goals, other than the promary one, of holding the organization blameless for any further research.