from Hacker News

Plan 9 released under GPLv2

by mischief6 on 2/13/14, 4:04 PM with 167 comments

  • by 4ad on 2/13/14, 5:01 PM

    Title is misleading. Plan 9 was, and continue to be LPL. The Labs just made a special arrangement with these guys from Berkeley for them to distribute Plan 9 under dual-licensing terms. They in turn integrate Plan 9 bits into their GPL operating system (akaros).

    Plan 9 as distributed by the labs continues to be LPL (not GPL and not dual licensed).

  • by TallGuyShort on 2/13/14, 4:44 PM

    Referring to Plan 9's previous license, the Lucent Public License, Wikipedia says:

    '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."'

  • by cbaleanu on 2/13/14, 5:00 PM

    They also added Plan 9 to a github repository[0]

    [0] https://github.com/brho/plan9

  • by hrkristian on 2/13/14, 5:12 PM

    From the Wikipedia article:

    >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?

  • by etrain on 2/13/14, 5:22 PM

    The project responsible for getting the license changed is doing some awesome work in the manycore lightweight OS space - http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/news.php

  • by Dauntless on 2/13/14, 5:18 PM

    Can someone explain in plain talk what Plan 9 is and does? Thanks...

  • by davexunit on 2/13/14, 4:58 PM

    Great news, but they really should have picked GPLv3+ or GPLv2+.

  • by bobowzki on 2/14/14, 11:57 AM

    I'm always hoping Plan 9 will take off! Such an interesting system to experiment with...

    Would be interesting to see what would happen if a cloud provider offered an (updated) version.

  • by yosyp on 2/14/14, 3:37 AM

    seems to be a lot of confusion here. excellent explanation of this by Ron Minnich, directly from the 9fans mailing list http://9fans.net/archive/2014/02/75

  • by pjmlp on 2/13/14, 4:49 PM

    This is great news.

  • by e12e on 2/14/14, 4:07 AM

    Does anyone have some insight into how Akaros compares to (and contrasts with) Dragonfly BSD?

  • by brickcap on 2/13/14, 5:46 PM

    Am I the only one who thought this referred to the movie plan 9 from outer space?

  • by patrickg_zill on 2/14/14, 6:50 AM

    Is it easy to install under VMware, VirtualBox, or KVM?

  • by z3phyr on 2/13/14, 6:09 PM

    PLAN 9 uses its own standard of C

  • by dhfjgkrgjg on 2/13/14, 4:47 PM

    This is a big shame. They are already familiar with the BSD license, so why the GPL?