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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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 <russcox at gmail.com> -----

> Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 18:33:17 -0500
> From: Russ Cox <russcox at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Russ Cox <russcox at gmail.com>
> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
> 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 <grog at lemis.com> 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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