"Why do you think p9f asked for a relicensing of plan9 while it was already gpl licensed a few years ago ? Both are redistributable but the MIT version is also usable for closed source commercial projects while the GPL version is not. Does this matter ? Yes of course it matters for people or companies. Its sometimes amusing to see developers taking legal issues lightly."
A little historical note here, speaking as the person who got both those releases done. The late jmk and I labored over a period of many months in 2013 to get Plan 9 out under a BSD license. In the end, the copyright holder at that time required that we distribute it, via UC Berkeley, under the GPL. No choice. It was that or nothing. Those negotiations involved many people, and it almost did not happen at all. The p9f process was not a relicensing, it was a transfer of ownership of the code. One condition of the transfer, was that the GPL was explicitly named as a license we should not use. All agreed that the MIT license was a good one. So it's not really correct to say anyone asked for a relicensing to this or that specific license. The choice of license was always under the control of whoever owned Bell Labs, and the code base, at that time. ron On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 4:10 PM hiro <23h...@gmail.com> wrote: > > even if it won't be used, it can still serve as example. there's sense > in that for some people. > > there aren't many real-world products/solutions based on plan9, so > people who are interested to learn from others don't have so much > choice. > every addition can be potentially useful for somebody in the community. > no harm done generally, as long as you give no false hopes... > > as i said, users tend to find unexpected, unintended ways of making > use of things. > > On 1/30/22, ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote: > > What I meant was that there is no sense in sharing the code for a special > > purpose kiosk app. > > > > For people who are interested search for > > > > gpl infringement tv boxes > > > > You will find many examples of companies who took gpl too lightly and got > > sued by FSF. The more users a product has which used GPL without making the > > code available the higher the risk gets that they get sued. FSF isn't as > > weak as many think they are. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T3e07bfdf263a83c8-M6750785ec749b2e318804a0f Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
