Plan 9 license

[Matthew C. Weigel]

On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, David Johnson wrote:

> Hmmm, I'll have to disagree just a little bit. Although I am no fan of
> corporations, and consider the fiction of corporations as legal persons
> to be just that, fiction, attempts to eliminate this "advantage" cross
> the line from public into private, and that's not a good thing to do.

I agree.

> change the software's license. It doesn't matter if the corporation
> tells me as an employee not to redistribute their modifications, since
> it is not their copyright to change. As long as I personally possess a
> copy, I can redistribute it. 

Unless those modifications make other requirements incompatible with the
GPL, such as third-party patent licenses.  And that's at least part of why
private copies should not be required to be distributed; it may remove the
ability to even *make* private modifications.  That's another strike against
the "no IP suits against contributors" clause as well.

> of it. As long as the software remains internal to the corporation, it
> is the equivalent to a tool. And telling someone what they can or can't
> do with their own tools in their own shop is one restriction too many.

Woohoo!  We agree :)  And so Plan 9 has at least one restriction too many...
:)

> > In contrast small companies cooperating with each other would in
> > practise always be forced to make their modifications available.
> 
> required to give it up. Just because one cannot prevent others from
> redistributing the software in their possession, it does not follow
> that they must force the others to redistribute them.

Exactly.  GPL'd software is exactly as "public" as the licensees and
most-derivative copyright holders (all together) want it to be.  

 Matthew Weigel
 Programmer/Student
 weigel+ at pitt.edu