16 ms·

AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by Lou Reed, Debbie Harry

439 points by asjo 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago
Because it just ain’t right burning a CD ROM and not filling it up
nailer 4y ago
There was also VQF from Yamaha, people seriously had discussions on whether MP3 or VQF would become the dominant format. Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K USD.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Even Bill Gates knows you let people pirate the product first, then squeeze them for license fees.
- RajT88 4y ago
  VQF was indeed better. Smaller files, same fidelity. I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like that.
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  Fun fact: Apple's CoreAudio to this day can't output MP3. It can read it fine just not write it. :)
  - astrange 4y ago
    The iTunes MP3 encoder is really bad, so nobody should want it to.
jonahx 4y ago
I feel like part of the story is missing, or I am missing something... why couldn't they just confirm the releases?
- blihp 4y ago
  The lawyer didn't care... they just used their power to block the release. Since it wasn't something that mattered to them, they likely never gave it a second thought. This isn't terribly uncommon (it's not just an issue with lawyers, but with any corporate gatekeeper) in the business world.
  - jonahx 4y ago
    So there was no mechanism to appeal the decision, presumably? Lawyer says "nope", gives bullshit reason, and that's it? Nothing further to be done?
    - dleslie 4y ago
      Probably not, no; because to cross the corporate power broker is to invite their wrath. It will make future asks of them impossible, or at least costly.
    - salmo 4y ago
      Usually you can, but it better be worth it. You’ll have to get an officer to say they’re willing to accept the risk with a high level legal counsel. If you tossed this idea up to that level, you’d piss the officer off for wasting his time and burn the relationship with the lawyer. Also, this team was pretty infamous at that point for not playing nice with the corporate structure (eg naming the OS Plan 9). Sure, they were rockstars to nerds, but Unix, etc. never made Bell/AT&T real money. Wasn’t their fault, but they never got internal clout and were just a small, weird group in a giant company.
      - bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
        My current role is the first where I've extensively worked with counsel. My biggest misconception going into these discussions was that it'd be a transactional, approval-gated thing: I make a request, they kick it around, then come back and say "yes" or "no" and that would be the end of it. What I've found is exactly what you describe: if I come to legal asking for a "no" – which I've done more than a handful of times – that's an easy answer that comes out of an email. But when I come wanting their approval, if I can get past the first meeting with counsel the next one is with officers, you are pitching the benefits while the lawyers are talking about risks, and if you can convince everyone to take the risks you get what you want. Just be sure to write down meeting minutes and send them around; no one at that level was taking notes ;) "We want to distribute a ton of IP with unclear/insufficient releases" has almost no benefit and a mountain of risk for any company. It's no wonder the lawyers said no.
anarchy89 4y ago
Anyone know what the file format they used was?
- pdw 4y ago
  It must have been an early version of AAC. Bell was involved with that. And another message in the thread claims "the early versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good as the later versions (which became apples stuff)"
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Regarding the early formats' fidelity, the defense Napster should have won with was that the plaintiff's assumption that digital copies were any good was false. The mp3s in question were barely broadcast quality, thus sharing low bitrate mp3 was not any different from sharing recordings of broadcast radio, a legal activity.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  PAC - Perceptual Audio Coder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2
- tkhattra 4y ago
  see this 1995 Wired interview with ken thompson - https://www.wired.com/1995/08/thompson-4/ https://www.wired.com/1995/08/thompson-4/.
overeater 4y ago
This stories reminds me of the times before tech dominance, when programmers and innovators needed to get permission to do almost anything. Tech people were not allowed to run companies, or even manage people -- you needed MBAs for that. Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying to start a business like Uber or Spotify. New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns. Even web pages posting content about circumventing current systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money (besides asking people to mail you checks). While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting provider for your website that shows scraped public data.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. _cough_ Patents _cough_.
WalterBright 4y ago
When I developed the first native C++ compiler around 1987, I thought I'd better check with AT&T's lawyers if I could: 1. sell a C++ compiler 2. call it C++ Their lawyer was very nice, and said sure. He also laughed and said he appreciated that I was the only one who bothered to ask.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Still boggles my mind reading things like this- so cool to hear origin stories from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But if he hadn't been nice what would have happened? I'm sad to imagine the future we are headed towards where only new technologies are worked on, just to get the patents and sit on them, while everything pre-existing is deprecated and abandoned. Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish works eerily well. Do you think we are headed in a better direction now? Or is it simply different? I remember working with ATT in the late 90's when it was ATT broadband. They were still using green screen computer terminal windows for everything and were trying to get a GUI off the ground. Everything was alt and tab to switch windows etc, no mouse support! Into the mid 2000's! This was done by getting regular employees to try and cobble something together. The miraculous thing was that they pulled it off. Just took them a few years longer than it should have. ATT 'corporate' was known for being every bit the tv trope of a big business back then. I remember seeing early builds and laughing it was so bad. ATT in particular was very much stuck in its ways as a corporation and was not inclined to change even the most broken of things. When it finally rolled out it was such a mess. All the IT people could do was wince. Everyone but the people who mattered saw it coming. They hired some firm to re-do it all. That happened who knows how many times within just a few years after that. Went from refusing to update to doing it constantly and always breaking things. I must say it was pretty insane watching $12k long distance bills from calls to, for instance India, get re-rated to several dollars. Wondered how accurate the accounting could possibly be with so many inaccurate and fungible dollar amounts floating around. Edit to add- years later I was working as an HVAC service technician and had to do some work at cell phone towers, server locations (wasn't really server farms back then), and phone agent locations for all cell phone carriers in Albuquerque, NM. It felt surreal to see bow fast and far the companies had gotten in only a few short years. Companies (especially ATT) that couldn't figure out basic things about computers were at the cutting edge of like all the technology they used. ACs were top of the line Lieberts, they had all proprietary software on everything. The super remote cell phone towers had AC, power, storage, and communications redundancy. Their security had been beefed up to top tier. Contractors all needed top tier security clearance now. I don't know if it was the Kevin Mitnick generation of phone phreaks, hackers, and social engineering, or the world in general, or a change in CEO but it was kind of like watching the titanic become some super-advanced space-faring time-warping ship. That had kinda given me hope that- damn, maybe we can enter the new age jumping in with both feet. As a kid it felt like progress had been so slow!
AlbertCory 4y ago
People questioning whether the lawyer really had the power to block this don't know how legal departments in big corporations work, as others have pointed out. A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution." The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way. This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  The question that should be asked is not "can we do this?" but "what do we need to do to make this happen?"
  - s3ctor8 4y ago
    This holds true for a number of situations where approval is required. For me it's particularly helpful when looking for IT/Information Security approval. "What actions/precautions do you recommend I take, so that you will approve this when you are asked to (and we are implementing a secure solution)?"
- duxup 4y ago
  The few times I was involved in “we should ask legal” situations and it wasn’t the most obvious yes… I just checked out after that as some legal drone always came back with some “no” and sometimes some really wonky situations they made up that frankly read more like some random internet legal expert rather than someone with training.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Yes, indeed. I could tell a great story, but just doing that would itself violate a No some lawyer gave me.
Beldin 4y ago
That comment about the stack of CDs mysteriously disappearing right from under the presenter's nose while he kept on fiddling with his slides is hilarious.
- sovietswag 4y ago
  lol "the presenter".... who was Ken Thompson
  - wiredfool 4y ago
    Would you trust one of those CDs?
    - hulitu 4y ago
      One ? not. Only the rest :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 4y ago
I asked a (great) boss I had once if we should get the legal department's opinion on something very minor. They had a great response, which was that nothing-- unless absolutely necessary by policy or significant risk-- should ever be given to them unless we wanted to wait 6 months for them to tell us "no". YMMV based on the nature of issues your legal folks have to deal with on a regular basis. In our case, anything outside of standard contract review they had a reputation of being a nightmare to deal with.
- mynameishere 4y ago
  The legal department is useful if your boss wanted to scuttle something. https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31 https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31
- iasay 4y ago
  That sounds like our purchasing department. AWS always gets business first now because we don’t have to raise a PO
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And now you know how AWS works and makes their money.
  - boondaburrah 4y ago
    similarly, webapps have eaten desktop software because you don't have to raise a ticket with IT to get approval for a software install.
- james_in_the_uk 4y ago
  If you are doing something that isn't significantly risky and isn't identified by policy as likely to give rise to a significant risk, then you don't need to ask a company lawyer. If you ask them anyway, it might take a while to get a reply, because they'll be prioritising significant risks.
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Bayart 4y ago
I wish I was as cool as Rob Pike.
- indrora 4y ago
  You really don't. Having experienced him, he's kindof an asshole. Smart, but with the tact un an unpleasant rash.
dagurp 4y ago
What's plan 9?
- msla 4y ago
  The OS the people who created Unix did after they'd decided that networked workstations with high-resolution graphics displays and mice were the way the future would look. In some ways, it's a cleaned-up Unix, and in others, it's a different design, based more around computers on a LAN sharing resources than than terminals connecting to a central system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
  - masswerk 4y ago
    Kudos for providing an answer (also a very good short answer) instead of simply downvoting a question!
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >What's plan 9? The sibling comment gave a good answer. But don't take their word (or Wikipedia's, for that matter) for it. Go ahead and install[0] it yourself. I'd recommend a VM. [0] https://plan9.io/plan9/ https://plan9.io/plan9/
  - drybjed 4y ago
    You can also watch an excellent series of videos[1] from the adventuresin9[2] YouTube channel, showcasing the Plan 9 system itself (based on 9front fork) and its capabilities. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/vid... [2]: https://youtube.com/adventuresin9 https://youtube.com/adventuresin9
- jacquesm 4y ago
  In a nutshell: an iterative improvement on the UNIX concept of everything is a file. In UNIX everything is a file unless it isn't (a device, for instance, which just looks like a file but does not behave as such), in plan 9 that is so cleanly implemented that you can run one window manager inside another (and if you want while using the CPU resources of yet another machine) without losing stride.
james_in_the_uk 4y ago
Alternative headline: Insufficiently clear IP releases mean AT&T not willing to take risk of distributing copyrighted music just to pad out a CD-ROM.
- lukeh 4y ago
  Yeah, I kinda agree here. Music licensing is complex and also likely unfamiliar to AT&T’s lawyers. It’s not unusual for signed musicians to be not 100% across their obligations on both the master and publishing sides (not saying that this was necessarily the case here, of course). At the very least even if the master was cleared, AT&T would likely have needed to pay mechanical royalties to the artists’ PROs or publishers.
lostgame 4y ago
I was happy to read[0] that the OS was indeed named after the so-bad-it’s-good cult film ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. [0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Correction: No, it's just bad. Wonderfully, spectacularly, bad.
choppaface 4y ago
“And that, my friends, is why MP-3 took off instead of the far better follow-on system we were on the cusp of getting out the door.” I dunno, maybe the technical problem from the beginning was distribution and installs and not actually compression. Maybe lawyers suck, but maybe Plan 9 was actually more for entertainment than anything else.
- antonvs 4y ago
  I rolled my eyes at that quote. People always have excuses for not finishing something.
pmarreck 4y ago
This is a literal tragedy
mdrzn 4y ago
"The Plan 9 CD-ROM needed about 100MB for the full distribution, if that." I have no idea what they are talking about, what Plan 9 is, what is being distributed, why is AT&T involved, etc. Read the whole first post, still have no clue.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Here's a handy guide to uncovering such information for yourself, and being able to write a TIL rather than an IHNFC: TUHS is The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, which might offer you some cues as to context. There's a link at the top-right of the submitted link: https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/ https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/ Rob Pike is Kind of A Big Deal in Unix, C (he's the Pike in Kernighan and Pike, a/k/a The UNIX Programming Environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...)) The Go programming language, and a thing called Plan 9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike Plan 9 From Outer Space was a so utterly bad it's ... well, just bad ... 1957 science fiction film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space Plan 9 from Bell Labs appropriated the name from the film for an operating system building on Pike's (and others') earlier experience developing Unix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs You can download and install Plan 9 OS if you like: https://plan9.io/plan9/ https://plan9.io/plan9/ Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

439 points by asjo 4y ago

Because it just ain’t right burning a CD ROM and not filling it up

There was also VQF from Yamaha, people seriously had discussions on whether MP3 or VQF would become the dominant format. Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K USD.

bitwize 4y ago
Even Bill Gates knows you let people pirate the product first, then squeeze them for license fees.
RajT88 4y ago
VQF was indeed better. Smaller files, same fidelity. I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like that.
kybernetyk 4y ago
Fun fact: Apple's CoreAudio to this day can't output MP3. It can read it fine just not write it. :)
- astrange 4y ago
  The iTunes MP3 encoder is really bad, so nobody should want it to.

jonahx 4y ago

I feel like part of the story is missing, or I am missing something... why couldn't they just confirm the releases?

blihp 4y ago
The lawyer didn't care... they just used their power to block the release. Since it wasn't something that mattered to them, they likely never gave it a second thought. This isn't terribly uncommon (it's not just an issue with lawyers, but with any corporate gatekeeper) in the business world.
- jonahx 4y ago
  So there was no mechanism to appeal the decision, presumably? Lawyer says "nope", gives bullshit reason, and that's it? Nothing further to be done?
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Probably not, no; because to cross the corporate power broker is to invite their wrath. It will make future asks of them impossible, or at least costly.
  - salmo 4y ago
    Usually you can, but it better be worth it. You’ll have to get an officer to say they’re willing to accept the risk with a high level legal counsel. If you tossed this idea up to that level, you’d piss the officer off for wasting his time and burn the relationship with the lawyer. Also, this team was pretty infamous at that point for not playing nice with the corporate structure (eg naming the OS Plan 9). Sure, they were rockstars to nerds, but Unix, etc. never made Bell/AT&T real money. Wasn’t their fault, but they never got internal clout and were just a small, weird group in a giant company.
    - bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
      My current role is the first where I've extensively worked with counsel. My biggest misconception going into these discussions was that it'd be a transactional, approval-gated thing: I make a request, they kick it around, then come back and say "yes" or "no" and that would be the end of it. What I've found is exactly what you describe: if I come to legal asking for a "no" – which I've done more than a handful of times – that's an easy answer that comes out of an email. But when I come wanting their approval, if I can get past the first meeting with counsel the next one is with officers, you are pitching the benefits while the lawyers are talking about risks, and if you can convince everyone to take the risks you get what you want. Just be sure to write down meeting minutes and send them around; no one at that level was taking notes ;) "We want to distribute a ton of IP with unclear/insufficient releases" has almost no benefit and a mountain of risk for any company. It's no wonder the lawyers said no.

anarchy89 4y ago

Anyone know what the file format they used was?

pdw 4y ago
It must have been an early version of AAC. Bell was involved with that. And another message in the thread claims "the early versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good as the later versions (which became apples stuff)"
- Maursault 4y ago
  Regarding the early formats' fidelity, the defense Napster should have won with was that the plaintiff's assumption that digital copies were any good was false. The mp3s in question were barely broadcast quality, thus sharing low bitrate mp3 was not any different from sharing recordings of broadcast radio, a legal activity.
MisterTea 4y ago
PAC - Perceptual Audio Coder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2
tkhattra 4y ago
see this 1995 Wired interview with ken thompson - https://www.wired.com/1995/08/thompson-4/ https://www.wired.com/1995/08/thompson-4/.

overeater 4y ago

This stories reminds me of the times before tech dominance, when programmers and innovators needed to get permission to do almost anything. Tech people were not allowed to run companies, or even manage people -- you needed MBAs for that. Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying to start a business like Uber or Spotify. New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns. Even web pages posting content about circumventing current systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money (besides asking people to mail you checks). While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting provider for your website that shows scraped public data.

justinclift 4y ago
> we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. _cough_ Patents _cough_.

WalterBright 4y ago

When I developed the first native C++ compiler around 1987, I thought I'd better check with AT&T's lawyers if I could: 1. sell a C++ compiler 2. call it C++ Their lawyer was very nice, and said sure. He also laughed and said he appreciated that I was the only one who bothered to ask.

effingwewt 4y ago
Still boggles my mind reading things like this- so cool to hear origin stories from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But if he hadn't been nice what would have happened? I'm sad to imagine the future we are headed towards where only new technologies are worked on, just to get the patents and sit on them, while everything pre-existing is deprecated and abandoned. Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish works eerily well. Do you think we are headed in a better direction now? Or is it simply different? I remember working with ATT in the late 90's when it was ATT broadband. They were still using green screen computer terminal windows for everything and were trying to get a GUI off the ground. Everything was alt and tab to switch windows etc, no mouse support! Into the mid 2000's! This was done by getting regular employees to try and cobble something together. The miraculous thing was that they pulled it off. Just took them a few years longer than it should have. ATT 'corporate' was known for being every bit the tv trope of a big business back then. I remember seeing early builds and laughing it was so bad. ATT in particular was very much stuck in its ways as a corporation and was not inclined to change even the most broken of things. When it finally rolled out it was such a mess. All the IT people could do was wince. Everyone but the people who mattered saw it coming. They hired some firm to re-do it all. That happened who knows how many times within just a few years after that. Went from refusing to update to doing it constantly and always breaking things. I must say it was pretty insane watching $12k long distance bills from calls to, for instance India, get re-rated to several dollars. Wondered how accurate the accounting could possibly be with so many inaccurate and fungible dollar amounts floating around. Edit to add- years later I was working as an HVAC service technician and had to do some work at cell phone towers, server locations (wasn't really server farms back then), and phone agent locations for all cell phone carriers in Albuquerque, NM. It felt surreal to see bow fast and far the companies had gotten in only a few short years. Companies (especially ATT) that couldn't figure out basic things about computers were at the cutting edge of like all the technology they used. ACs were top of the line Lieberts, they had all proprietary software on everything. The super remote cell phone towers had AC, power, storage, and communications redundancy. Their security had been beefed up to top tier. Contractors all needed top tier security clearance now. I don't know if it was the Kevin Mitnick generation of phone phreaks, hackers, and social engineering, or the world in general, or a change in CEO but it was kind of like watching the titanic become some super-advanced space-faring time-warping ship. That had kinda given me hope that- damn, maybe we can enter the new age jumping in with both feet. As a kid it felt like progress had been so slow!

AlbertCory 4y ago

People questioning whether the lawyer really had the power to block this don't know how legal departments in big corporations work, as others have pointed out. A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution." The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way. This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.

pmoriarty 4y ago
The question that should be asked is not "can we do this?" but "what do we need to do to make this happen?"
- s3ctor8 4y ago
  This holds true for a number of situations where approval is required. For me it's particularly helpful when looking for IT/Information Security approval. "What actions/precautions do you recommend I take, so that you will approve this when you are asked to (and we are implementing a secure solution)?"
duxup 4y ago
The few times I was involved in “we should ask legal” situations and it wasn’t the most obvious yes… I just checked out after that as some legal drone always came back with some “no” and sometimes some really wonky situations they made up that frankly read more like some random internet legal expert rather than someone with training.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Yes, indeed. I could tell a great story, but just doing that would itself violate a No some lawyer gave me.

Beldin 4y ago

That comment about the stack of CDs mysteriously disappearing right from under the presenter's nose while he kept on fiddling with his slides is hilarious.

sovietswag 4y ago
lol "the presenter".... who was Ken Thompson
- wiredfool 4y ago
  Would you trust one of those CDs?
  - hulitu 4y ago
    One ? not. Only the rest :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 4y ago

I asked a (great) boss I had once if we should get the legal department's opinion on something very minor. They had a great response, which was that nothing-- unless absolutely necessary by policy or significant risk-- should ever be given to them unless we wanted to wait 6 months for them to tell us "no". YMMV based on the nature of issues your legal folks have to deal with on a regular basis. In our case, anything outside of standard contract review they had a reputation of being a nightmare to deal with.

mynameishere 4y ago
The legal department is useful if your boss wanted to scuttle something. https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31 https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31
iasay 4y ago
That sounds like our purchasing department. AWS always gets business first now because we don’t have to raise a PO
- bombcar 4y ago
  And now you know how AWS works and makes their money.
- boondaburrah 4y ago
  similarly, webapps have eaten desktop software because you don't have to raise a ticket with IT to get approval for a software install.
james_in_the_uk 4y ago
If you are doing something that isn't significantly risky and isn't identified by policy as likely to give rise to a significant risk, then you don't need to ask a company lawyer. If you ask them anyway, it might take a while to get a reply, because they'll be prioritising significant risks.
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Bayart 4y ago

I wish I was as cool as Rob Pike.

indrora 4y ago
You really don't. Having experienced him, he's kindof an asshole. Smart, but with the tact un an unpleasant rash.

dagurp 4y ago

What's plan 9?

msla 4y ago
The OS the people who created Unix did after they'd decided that networked workstations with high-resolution graphics displays and mice were the way the future would look. In some ways, it's a cleaned-up Unix, and in others, it's a different design, based more around computers on a LAN sharing resources than than terminals connecting to a central system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
- masswerk 4y ago
  Kudos for providing an answer (also a very good short answer) instead of simply downvoting a question!
nobody9999 4y ago
>What's plan 9? The sibling comment gave a good answer. But don't take their word (or Wikipedia's, for that matter) for it. Go ahead and install[0] it yourself. I'd recommend a VM. [0] https://plan9.io/plan9/ https://plan9.io/plan9/
- drybjed 4y ago
  You can also watch an excellent series of videos[1] from the adventuresin9[2] YouTube channel, showcasing the Plan 9 system itself (based on 9front fork) and its capabilities. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/vid... [2]: https://youtube.com/adventuresin9 https://youtube.com/adventuresin9
jacquesm 4y ago
In a nutshell: an iterative improvement on the UNIX concept of everything is a file. In UNIX everything is a file unless it isn't (a device, for instance, which just looks like a file but does not behave as such), in plan 9 that is so cleanly implemented that you can run one window manager inside another (and if you want while using the CPU resources of yet another machine) without losing stride.

james_in_the_uk 4y ago

Alternative headline: Insufficiently clear IP releases mean AT&T not willing to take risk of distributing copyrighted music just to pad out a CD-ROM.

lukeh 4y ago
Yeah, I kinda agree here. Music licensing is complex and also likely unfamiliar to AT&T’s lawyers. It’s not unusual for signed musicians to be not 100% across their obligations on both the master and publishing sides (not saying that this was necessarily the case here, of course). At the very least even if the master was cleared, AT&T would likely have needed to pay mechanical royalties to the artists’ PROs or publishers.

lostgame 4y ago

I was happy to read[0] that the OS was indeed named after the so-bad-it’s-good cult film ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. [0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

dredmorbius 4y ago
Correction: No, it's just bad. Wonderfully, spectacularly, bad.

choppaface 4y ago

“And that, my friends, is why MP-3 took off instead of the far better follow-on system we were on the cusp of getting out the door.” I dunno, maybe the technical problem from the beginning was distribution and installs and not actually compression. Maybe lawyers suck, but maybe Plan 9 was actually more for entertainment than anything else.

antonvs 4y ago
I rolled my eyes at that quote. People always have excuses for not finishing something.

pmarreck 4y ago

This is a literal tragedy

mdrzn 4y ago

"The Plan 9 CD-ROM needed about 100MB for the full distribution, if that." I have no idea what they are talking about, what Plan 9 is, what is being distributed, why is AT&T involved, etc. Read the whole first post, still have no clue.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Here's a handy guide to uncovering such information for yourself, and being able to write a TIL rather than an IHNFC: TUHS is The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, which might offer you some cues as to context. There's a link at the top-right of the submitted link: https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/ https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/ Rob Pike is Kind of A Big Deal in Unix, C (he's the Pike in Kernighan and Pike, a/k/a The UNIX Programming Environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...)) The Go programming language, and a thing called Plan 9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike Plan 9 From Outer Space was a so utterly bad it's ... well, just bad ... 1957 science fiction film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space Plan 9 from Bell Labs appropriated the name from the film for an operating system building on Pike's (and others') earlier experience developing Unix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs You can download and install Plan 9 OS if you like: https://plan9.io/plan9/ https://plan9.io/plan9/ Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/