9 ms·

Theo de Raadt on Plan 9 licensing (2003)

78 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

bitwize 11y ago
If it were up to ken and dennis, it would have been wtfpl-licensed, I'm sure.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Not that it would make Theo happy, but Plan 9 is now also licensed under GPL V2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License
- SixSigma 11y ago
  The toolchain was Gpl/MIT first as part of Inferno. The OpenBSD team were interested in said toolchain to replace GCC. His railing at the Plan9 team was a little unfair, we (the team and the community) mostly agreed with his basic point. It was Lucent legal that walked slowly. This was a time when money was on fire at Lucent. Bell-labs had removed every other lightbulb as a money saving exercise for example. Playing at Open Source wasn't very high up anyone's todo list. The initial opening of the code in 2000 was just too late for plan9, the GPL was eating the world.
Pyxl101 11y ago
> I urge everyone in power regarding this issue to think this through -- and then, make your simple compiler which we can build into a trusted component FREE, or, if you don't, sometime in the next few years something else which is simple and matches it in power, can and might and probably will show up (because it is clear the gnu bloat compiler will never achieve such a goal...) Looks like Theo correctly predicted the advent of clang. Related: http://www.quora.com/Compilers/Why-did-Apple-create-Clang http://www.quora.com/Compilers/Why-did-Apple-create-Clang
- cwzwarich 11y ago
  Clang is dramatically more complex than the Plan 9 compiler, and doesn't really qualify for satisfying Theo's prediction.
  - Flow 11y ago
    Maybe that is because clang supports much more than plain C? Also, they have set a very ambitious goal with the friendly error messages for C++.
    - ben_bai 11y ago
      Just linking libclang.so (newest svn version) takes over 8GB of memory. How much more you ask? Well we will find out when i got more ram. So i don't see that compiler becoming a gcc replacement in OpenBSD anytime soon.
      - batou 11y ago
        I think something that requires 8Gb memory to run the linker has a bug.
        rockdoe 11y ago
        The memory use at the "link step" is so high because due to whole-program optimization, that's the point where everything actually compiles. It used to be fairly typical for large C++ applications. Chromium and Firefox had problems with it before GCC got fixed. Sounds like clang still has work to do there.
        batou 11y ago
        I completely agree but my point is more that the compiler shouldn't be that large even whilst linking and doing whole program optimisation. Proportionately to the size of the output binary the overhead is unreasonably large. Firefox and Chrome for example are problematic due to the architecture. I've built modular applications which compile smaller units (.so's) that are runtime linked using dlopen() etc. Not quite the same scale but this was in a time when the kit was a lot slower. I'd like to see a return to a simpler time. We can afford to lose some of the optimisations now and produce clean, simple, fast and predictable compilers. I think Roslyn/RyuJIT on the .Net platform is an example of where this all falls apart: bad tail call optimisation leads to non-determinism in parameter passing. If the compiler consists of lots of code then there are lots of bugs and you can't afford bugs there.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 11y ago
The license itself, which is critical to this discussion, is a dead link. If it's not included then we're just re-opening an old flamewar.
- 4ad 11y ago
  Can't remember if he was talking about the first, or the second version of the LPL, but in any case, around the same time-frame (can't remember exactly when either) the compilers were available under the MIT license, distributed as part of Inferno (Inferno generally is GPLv2/commercial, but the compilers were MIT).
  - EdiX 11y ago
    He's talking about the current version. The first version was rejected by OSI.
    - 4ad 11y ago
      It might have been rejected by OSI, but it was used for several years.
      - EdiX 11y ago
        for several = 2, yes.
_wldu 11y ago
"I urge you to write something much simpler." When I was younger, I thought that the OpenBSD folks were backward and unsophisticated when compared to Linux. I imagine that a lot of younger people feel that way. But after working with various systems over the years, I can now really appreciate that simplicity. It's really the heart and soul of OpenBSD, OpenSSH and all the other projects (libreSSL, etc.) that they release.
- batou 11y ago
  This. I really wish I could get paid to use it but everyone wants Linux and Microsoft shufflers. I can live in hope.
jane_is_here 11y ago
"Note that I sell OpenBSD CDs to fund our project. That contract right there says in term 7: If Theo accidentally sells a CD to North Korea, the US can fuck him. Thanks OSI. Thanks for being so damn patriotic. It also says in term 4: Sell this in a product in ways which "we" do not like, and the contract you have accepted says you can be fucked by anyone who owns this license later and who decides they want to fuck you. Who is "we". You don't read term 4 that way? ." Is he for real ?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- BuildTheRobots 11y ago
  He's extremely real; one of the three founders of NetBSD and the founder of OpenBSD. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt
pnut 11y ago
His writing style makes me cringe... just unprofessional, regardless of content.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  "Professionalism" is usually nothing more than a euphemism for using PC/CYA language and avoiding any type of discussion of hard truths because they might offend someone in power. Technology as an industry would be better if we discarded it.
  - billyhoffman 11y ago
    "Professionalism" is expressing yourself without using ad hominem attacks or insults. Using professionalism actually makes your points stronger, since people are forced to discuss and debate facts instead of how focusing on how you are behaving like a child. I'm sick of this idea that "professionalism" == whiny or politically correct and being "honest" allows you to be a jerk. The entire thing is so unproductive.
    - tw04 11y ago
      What's unproductive is forcing people to tap dance around their true feelings on a subject for fear of hurting someone else's feelings. As a grown adult, I'd much rather have someone use offensive language but be honest than spend so much effort trying not to offend anyone that we all have to guess at what they really want.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        You put this into better words than I ever could. What it comes down to is that someone being a "jerk" can be willfully ignored or looked past to see what their point is. (And IMO, stubbornly refusing to do this is a lot more of an indication of childishness than how few four letter words you use.. i.e. it's a tone argument, i.e. near bottom of PG's hierarchy) If the "point" part is unclear, there's no looking past it, and the problem never gets solved since asking someone to stop beating around the bush is seen as jerk behavior.
protomyth 11y ago
"Put another way... do you guys have some kick ass technology that you want to change the world, or don't you?" At the right time they might have had just that. I do hate Lucent's lawyers for the roadblocks. Who actually owns the copyright on Plan 9 these days?
- pavlov 11y ago
  Nokia recently acquired Lucent and Bell Labs... So the answer is probably "a Finnish telecom equipment maker that many people mistakenly assume was bought by Microsoft".
  - razzmataz 11y ago
    Alcatel, Alcatel not Nokia bought Lucent.
    - pavlov 11y ago
      Yes, and Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent this year.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        Wonder how much cash it would take to get Plan 9 open sourced under MIT / BSD license?
- justin66 11y ago
  The licensing became a lot more reasonable after the episode in 2003. Licensing info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/licence.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/licence.html
phkahler 11y ago
>> The license you propose is NOT FREE SOFTWARE. I am astounded the OSI has gone and decided to become an organization that just rubber stamps things which are not free. I don't know who they are talking to, but these "licenses" which they approve are chock full of constraints against various segments of the user community. OSI is not about free software. It's not even very good about open source. They seemed happy if people had access to the source code regardless of the terms around it. They approved lots of licenses that had crap in them. IMHO BSD/MIT or GPL/LGPL are pretty much it. If you need a different license than those, you've probably got an agenda. OSI gave a rubber stamp to different agendas.
- candeira 11y ago
  Please point one single OSI-approved license that is not free by the FSF's Free Software Definition and/or the Debian Free Software Guidelines. I'd be delighted to learn something I don't know. I asked Stallman once, and he could only remember a case where OSI messed up and then fixed it when they realised.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    Well this is turning into a lesson for me. There are a few that used to be non-free until newer versions came along: Apple Public Source License - was nonfree before 2.0 Artistic License 1.0 was nonfree. 2.0 is. Reciprocal Public License - FSF doesn't indicate a revision, but OSI shows a version 1.5. Without history it's not clear weather these were OSI approved before revision. There are also some in the OSI list that are not on the FSF list, so I'm not sure if they're free or not. But I still stand by my second assertion that most of them are unnecessary. If you're not BSD/MIT compatible and not GPL/LGPL compatible, your code will probably have a limited life.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Without history it's not clear weather these were OSI approved before revision. OSI has history. All licenses approved by OSI are either on the current list [0] or the superceded list (where the originator of the OSI-approved licenses has indicated it should not be used for new work) [1]. [0] http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical [1] http://opensource.org/licenses/do-not-use http://opensource.org/licenses/do-not-use

78 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

If it were up to ken and dennis, it would have been wtfpl-licensed, I'm sure.

Not that it would make Theo happy, but Plan 9 is now also licensed under GPL V2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License

SixSigma 11y ago
The toolchain was Gpl/MIT first as part of Inferno. The OpenBSD team were interested in said toolchain to replace GCC. His railing at the Plan9 team was a little unfair, we (the team and the community) mostly agreed with his basic point. It was Lucent legal that walked slowly. This was a time when money was on fire at Lucent. Bell-labs had removed every other lightbulb as a money saving exercise for example. Playing at Open Source wasn't very high up anyone's todo list. The initial opening of the code in 2000 was just too late for plan9, the GPL was eating the world.

Pyxl101 11y ago

> I urge everyone in power regarding this issue to think this through -- and then, make your simple compiler which we can build into a trusted component FREE, or, if you don't, sometime in the next few years something else which is simple and matches it in power, can and might and probably will show up (because it is clear the gnu bloat compiler will never achieve such a goal...) Looks like Theo correctly predicted the advent of clang. Related: http://www.quora.com/Compilers/Why-did-Apple-create-Clang http://www.quora.com/Compilers/Why-did-Apple-create-Clang

cwzwarich 11y ago
Clang is dramatically more complex than the Plan 9 compiler, and doesn't really qualify for satisfying Theo's prediction.
- Flow 11y ago
  Maybe that is because clang supports much more than plain C? Also, they have set a very ambitious goal with the friendly error messages for C++.
  - ben_bai 11y ago
    Just linking libclang.so (newest svn version) takes over 8GB of memory. How much more you ask? Well we will find out when i got more ram. So i don't see that compiler becoming a gcc replacement in OpenBSD anytime soon.
    - batou 11y ago
      I think something that requires 8Gb memory to run the linker has a bug.
      - rockdoe 11y ago
        The memory use at the "link step" is so high because due to whole-program optimization, that's the point where everything actually compiles. It used to be fairly typical for large C++ applications. Chromium and Firefox had problems with it before GCC got fixed. Sounds like clang still has work to do there.
        batou 11y ago
        I completely agree but my point is more that the compiler shouldn't be that large even whilst linking and doing whole program optimisation. Proportionately to the size of the output binary the overhead is unreasonably large. Firefox and Chrome for example are problematic due to the architecture. I've built modular applications which compile smaller units (.so's) that are runtime linked using dlopen() etc. Not quite the same scale but this was in a time when the kit was a lot slower. I'd like to see a return to a simpler time. We can afford to lose some of the optimisations now and produce clean, simple, fast and predictable compilers. I think Roslyn/RyuJIT on the .Net platform is an example of where this all falls apart: bad tail call optimisation leads to non-determinism in parameter passing. If the compiler consists of lots of code then there are lots of bugs and you can't afford bugs there.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 11y ago

The license itself, which is critical to this discussion, is a dead link. If it's not included then we're just re-opening an old flamewar.

4ad 11y ago
Can't remember if he was talking about the first, or the second version of the LPL, but in any case, around the same time-frame (can't remember exactly when either) the compilers were available under the MIT license, distributed as part of Inferno (Inferno generally is GPLv2/commercial, but the compilers were MIT).
- EdiX 11y ago
  He's talking about the current version. The first version was rejected by OSI.
  - 4ad 11y ago
    It might have been rejected by OSI, but it was used for several years.
    - EdiX 11y ago
      for several = 2, yes.

_wldu 11y ago

"I urge you to write something much simpler." When I was younger, I thought that the OpenBSD folks were backward and unsophisticated when compared to Linux. I imagine that a lot of younger people feel that way. But after working with various systems over the years, I can now really appreciate that simplicity. It's really the heart and soul of OpenBSD, OpenSSH and all the other projects (libreSSL, etc.) that they release.

batou 11y ago
This. I really wish I could get paid to use it but everyone wants Linux and Microsoft shufflers. I can live in hope.

jane_is_here 11y ago

"Note that I sell OpenBSD CDs to fund our project. That contract right there says in term 7: If Theo accidentally sells a CD to North Korea, the US can fuck him. Thanks OSI. Thanks for being so damn patriotic. It also says in term 4: Sell this in a product in ways which "we" do not like, and the contract you have accepted says you can be fucked by anyone who owns this license later and who decides they want to fuck you. Who is "we". You don't read term 4 that way? ." Is he for real ?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
BuildTheRobots 11y ago
He's extremely real; one of the three founders of NetBSD and the founder of OpenBSD. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt

pnut 11y ago

His writing style makes me cringe... just unprofessional, regardless of content.

Karunamon 11y ago
"Professionalism" is usually nothing more than a euphemism for using PC/CYA language and avoiding any type of discussion of hard truths because they might offend someone in power. Technology as an industry would be better if we discarded it.
- billyhoffman 11y ago
  "Professionalism" is expressing yourself without using ad hominem attacks or insults. Using professionalism actually makes your points stronger, since people are forced to discuss and debate facts instead of how focusing on how you are behaving like a child. I'm sick of this idea that "professionalism" == whiny or politically correct and being "honest" allows you to be a jerk. The entire thing is so unproductive.
  - tw04 11y ago
    What's unproductive is forcing people to tap dance around their true feelings on a subject for fear of hurting someone else's feelings. As a grown adult, I'd much rather have someone use offensive language but be honest than spend so much effort trying not to offend anyone that we all have to guess at what they really want.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      You put this into better words than I ever could. What it comes down to is that someone being a "jerk" can be willfully ignored or looked past to see what their point is. (And IMO, stubbornly refusing to do this is a lot more of an indication of childishness than how few four letter words you use.. i.e. it's a tone argument, i.e. near bottom of PG's hierarchy) If the "point" part is unclear, there's no looking past it, and the problem never gets solved since asking someone to stop beating around the bush is seen as jerk behavior.

protomyth 11y ago

"Put another way... do you guys have some kick ass technology that you want to change the world, or don't you?" At the right time they might have had just that. I do hate Lucent's lawyers for the roadblocks. Who actually owns the copyright on Plan 9 these days?

pavlov 11y ago
Nokia recently acquired Lucent and Bell Labs... So the answer is probably "a Finnish telecom equipment maker that many people mistakenly assume was bought by Microsoft".
- razzmataz 11y ago
  Alcatel, Alcatel not Nokia bought Lucent.
  - pavlov 11y ago
    Yes, and Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent this year.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Wonder how much cash it would take to get Plan 9 open sourced under MIT / BSD license?
justin66 11y ago
The licensing became a lot more reasonable after the episode in 2003. Licensing info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/licence.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/licence.html

phkahler 11y ago

>> The license you propose is NOT FREE SOFTWARE. I am astounded the OSI has gone and decided to become an organization that just rubber stamps things which are not free. I don't know who they are talking to, but these "licenses" which they approve are chock full of constraints against various segments of the user community. OSI is not about free software. It's not even very good about open source. They seemed happy if people had access to the source code regardless of the terms around it. They approved lots of licenses that had crap in them. IMHO BSD/MIT or GPL/LGPL are pretty much it. If you need a different license than those, you've probably got an agenda. OSI gave a rubber stamp to different agendas.

candeira 11y ago
Please point one single OSI-approved license that is not free by the FSF's Free Software Definition and/or the Debian Free Software Guidelines. I'd be delighted to learn something I don't know. I asked Stallman once, and he could only remember a case where OSI messed up and then fixed it when they realised.
- phkahler 11y ago
  Well this is turning into a lesson for me. There are a few that used to be non-free until newer versions came along: Apple Public Source License - was nonfree before 2.0 Artistic License 1.0 was nonfree. 2.0 is. Reciprocal Public License - FSF doesn't indicate a revision, but OSI shows a version 1.5. Without history it's not clear weather these were OSI approved before revision. There are also some in the OSI list that are not on the FSF list, so I'm not sure if they're free or not. But I still stand by my second assertion that most of them are unnecessary. If you're not BSD/MIT compatible and not GPL/LGPL compatible, your code will probably have a limited life.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Without history it's not clear weather these were OSI approved before revision. OSI has history. All licenses approved by OSI are either on the current list [0] or the superceded list (where the originator of the OSI-approved licenses has indicated it should not be used for new work) [1]. [0] http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical [1] http://opensource.org/licenses/do-not-use http://opensource.org/licenses/do-not-use