Re: Direction of VSTa

Plan 9 is intended to be available to Universities and that's it; they
seem to want to get the benefits of what happenned with BSD but none
of the drawbacks (what drawbacks? well, AT&T lost "control" of it...)
The Plan 9 license is unusual enough that many people have punted on
it just to avoid having to ask a lawyer about it - sticking to *real*
BSD licensed code or GPL code because at least they know where they
stand. To look for yourself, check
        http://www.att.com/press/0795/950718.bla.html
        http://plan9.att.com/plan9/index.html
and in particular, the shrink-wrap license agreement:
        http://plan9.att.com/plan9/shrink.html

The killer excerpt seems to be

"Without executing an applicable sublicense with AT&T, no part of the
SOFTWARE may be published, sold, or offered for sale, nor may any part
of the SOFTWARE be made available on a computer network external to
you or your organization, nor may commercial services utilizing this
SOFTWARE be sold or offered for sale."

 which appears to prevent mirror sites, much less other
distributions. There is an exception that lets you transfer modified
copies to other LICENSEES of the software for internal research and
education purposes.

                                        _Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
                                        Cygnus Support, East Coast
Received on Mon Aug 7 08:19:53 1995