Plan 9 Copyright Transferred To Foundation, MIT Licensed Code Released

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's.

In addition to the Bell Labs Plan 9 software copyright being transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation, the code to Plan 9 Editions 1/2/3/4 are now released under an MIT license by the foundation. Previously the Plan 9 code released by Lucent Technologies was under the Lucent Public License or GPLv2.

Plan 9 4th Edition was the final version from Bell Labs while earlier editions were also MIT re-licensed for historical purposes. ISOs and Tarballs of the Plan 9 releases are available from p9f.org.

This copyright transfer to the Plan 9 Foundation was announced today at Bell-Labs.com.

The blog post concludes with, "ho knows, perhaps Plan 9 will become a part of the emerging distributed cloud infrastructure that will underpin the coming industrial revolution? And now it is simply left for me to smash the metaphorical magnum of champagne as Plan 9 sets sail on the next leg of her journey, to parts unknown."

Via p9f.org for the Plan 9 Foundation is a bootable Plan 9 version for the Raspberry Pi. Plan 9 is also participating in this year's Google Summer of Code.