Thankfully I am not at Lucent anymore and am not privy to the tortured negotiations that ended up at the obviously inelegant compromise of "The University of California, Berkeley, has been authorised by Alcatel-Lucent to release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2." But the odds are overwhelming that the one-word answer is "lawyers".
I don't think Plan9 has much commercial value in it left, but they may consider it would be awkward if, say, EMC or Cisco incorporated some of its technologies (Plan 9 had some interesting ideas about storage and network transparency) into their proprietary products without paying for them. It's easy to sympathize with the small garage inventor and to think it's nice for you to subsidize small innovators, but it's much harder to do the same with corporations that would patent-extort you the moment they realized they could gain some advantage from it.
There wouldn't be the whole GPL violations thingy if people were not already taking without giving under the GPL.
Plan 9 continues to be LPL.
'The clause in particular that causes it to be incompatible with the GNU GPL is "This Agreement is governed by the laws of the State of New York and the intellectual property laws of the United States of America."'
The point is the LPL license says you agree to be bound by New York law for license disputes even if you do not call New York home. Which means you have to defend any license violation suits in New York, because the odds of finding a Judge capable of hearing New York law cases outside of New York are rather slim.
I have assumed that the FSF's doctrine on this point actually grew out of concerns over one of the licenses in the complex Python license stack, the CNRI license, which has a Virginia choice-of-law clause, close to the time of Virginia's adoption of the controversial UCITA.
See: http://docs.python.org/2/license.html (CNRI license apparently from 2001) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Computer_Information_Tr... (indicating Virginia adopted UCITA in 2000)
Note that if a license does not have a choice of law clause, that just means one resorts to default rules about what jurisdiction's law applies to a given issue. (I.e., absence of a choice of law clause does not make the underlying issue go away.) Choice of law clauses are common in proprietary software licenses (and other commercial contracts) and are generally seen by lawyers as beneficial measures to reduce interpretive uncertainty (though obviously in 'form agreements' this is to the benefit of the licensor).
Of course, the real conflict is probably the LPL saying "No party to this Agreement will bring a legal action under this Agreement more than one year after the cause of action arose. Each party waives its rights to a jury trial in any resulting litigation."
* all objects are either files or file systems
* communication is over a network
* private namespaces (transparent access to remote processes) [1]
Even more modern concepts are in the NT kernel by Dave Cutler (VMS fame). NT uses an object metaphor that is pervasive throughout the architecture of the system. Not only are all of the things in the UNIX file metaphor viewed as objects by NT, but so are things such as processes and threads, shared memory segments, the global registry database and even access rights. [2] You can browse the NT object tree e.g. with the ReactOS Explorer on Windows or ReactOS. [3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
>Consequently, sharing the device across the network can be accomplished by mounting the corresponding directory tree to the target machine.
Does this mean Plan 9 natively supports sharing any device managed by the kernel over a network connection?
I've never really understood why 'import /proc' is better than 'cpu acid'. Yeah, there's cases where the remote host won't have acid installed.
More interesting, I think, would be stuff like getting /net in a VM from the host OS [surely 9vx or inferno's /net could be separated out], getting /dev/sd* from a 9P server that knows QCOW, etc.
Not mattering whether it's in the kernel or userspace, without using $LD_*, is also far more interesting that not mattering whether it's local or remote.
The Linux kernel is also GPLv2 (not +); I completely agree with the '+' thing as that leaves the FSF in control of the license (effectively).
Every time I look at Android phone or TV or a router I regret that BSD/MIT/Apache is so popular. Those devices run tivoized proprietary builds of what consists mostly of free software, but builds are shitty or just restricted (want a proper firewall? never mind it's there go buy next-tier device). And users can't do anything about that.
Users and GPLv3 deserve more love. They're already screwed by everyone and their pet code monkeys.
Plan 9 as distributed by the labs continues to be LPL (not GPL and not dual licensed).
From the GPL:
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
I'm assuming "it" in this case refers to the Plan 9 code.
The labs still only distribute Plan 9 under its own license. Now Plan 9 is available also underthe GPL, but the labs doesn't distribute that version. it's only relevant if they continue to work on it and don't continue to share their changes under the GPL.
At worst, there will be a fork under GPL and they will slowly diverge.
I don't know if the Berkley guys just got a bag of GPL code or if this is a continuous agreement, and they'll get subsequent, more recent code in the future. In the meantime, code from Bell Labs is LPL.
But as an older unix nerd/Go programmer, I have the opposite reaction where when I hear people talking about the movie it immediately reminds me of the OS.
Would be interesting to see what would happen if a cloud provider offered an (updated) version.
