Re: Re: Plan 9 port license (was: licence of ditroff?) - TUHS

7 Jun 2005

Somehow this message got stuck at the wrong end of my inbox.  It
relates to a thread on this list a few months back.  The content
speaks for itself, so I'll just forward it here.

Greg

----- Forwarded message from Russ Cox &lt;russcox(a)gmail.com&gt; -----

...
  Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 18:33:17 -0500
 From: Russ Cox &lt;russcox(a)gmail.com&gt;
 Reply-To: Russ Cox &lt;russcox(a)gmail.com&gt;
 To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey &lt;grog(a)lemis.com&gt;
 Subject: Re: Plan 9 port license (was: licence of ditroff?)

 [Feel free to forward this response to the appropriate lists.]

 On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 09:39:32 +1030, Greg 'groggy' Lehey &lt;grog(a)lemis.com&gt;
wrote:
  As you can see, there's a certain amount of
confusion about the
 license of this software.  I took a cursory look and couldn't find
 anything.  In this day of predatory companies, it would be good to
 have clarity.  Could you please clarify, both to the list and on the
 web site? 
 The license is the Lucent Public License.  There are some exceptions
 with MIT-like licensing, but troff is not one of them.  This is made clear
 if you look in the tar file -- there is a LICENSE file in the root that
 explains the situation.  I've added a link to this file on the web site
 next to the download link.

 I hate haggling over licensing so I try to draw as little attention as
 possible to such issues.  I do appreciate their importance.

 The Lucent Public License is the IBM Public License made optionally non-viral.
 If you want to contribute changes back to the Plan 9 project, then
 those changes must be made available under the LPL.  But (and
 this is where the difference is) if you don't want to contribute your
 changes back, then you don't have to.

 >> Instead of starting with 27 year old
code, you'd be better
>> off taking the troff from http://www.swtch.com/plan9port.
>
> Thanks, that's a nice idea, but from what I experienced,
> the portability of recent AT&T/Bell/Lucent/whatever code
> is worse than the bugs in old code (eg. I could not get
> ksh93 to compile, something in there just dumped core;
> but then that's Unix, not Plan 9). 
 Confusing Plan 9 with ksh is sure to offend both sets of authors.

 Plan9port builds and runs fine on Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS, and Mac OS X,
 and I'm sure it would be easy to get running on other Unix-like systems,
 but I haven't had the need and no one has mailed me diffs.

 >> This is a port of many Plan 9 utilities
to Unix.  The troff there
>> (a) has an explicit license that will probably do for the BSD people
>
> If it's the same licence as for 8c, then no, unfortunately. 
 It's the LucentPL as mentioned earlier.  I'm sure the BSD guys
 won't love it (it's not the BSD license), but at least it's not viral.

 Russ 
----- End forwarded message -----

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