On Mon, 14 May 2012 15:05:56 +0200 Aram Hăvărneanu <ara...@mgk.ro> wrote:
> Plan 9 is a research platform for programmers, not a product. As such, > your questions don't make sense. Everybody maintains their private > trees because this is the way the system is supposed to be used. Plan > 9 has a philosophy, but not a direction. There's no single roadmap. At > least not anymore. I think this is the clearest thing I've ever read on the state and governance of Plan 9, but at the end of the day somebody does rule what does and does not go into the iso, and that has a very strong influence on the system as a whole. As far as I'm aware that somebody is usually Geoff. A comparison with 9front might be interesting. Governance played some role in 9front forking from Plan 9. (Not as big a role as I may have stated in the past, my apologies to everyone who saw that.) I'm tempted to call 9front a military junta, but really the person who gets the most say is the person with the most time and ability to contribute code. The 9front community is a funny place. Insults fly like swarming bees but as soon as some idea comes up which doesn't look ridiculous at first glance they get stuck right in, a lot of discussion happens. Same for bug fixing. > Legal issues in the project? Unlike a particularly successful free > software project, the Plan 9 community cares about code and not about > licensing. Ditto for 9front, although they have replaced the fonts which were licensed "for distribution with Plan 9 only." Even this wasn't solely license-oriented; they cleaned up the font size numbering while they were at it. I think the 9front crowd cares about being a community and having one central tree with all the fixes and even all the features which meet their standards. There is certainly a latent disdain for the way desirable things may be lost in the forest of contrib. What their standards are is harder for me to say but they hate things which complexify the base system, such as nix's application-core feature.
