This is an alternative hosting to the one provided by the Plan9 "contrib" directory at /n/sources. Plan9 was developed by the same great Bell labs that once developed UNIX as a "UNIX done right". Currently, there are apart from the official distribution alternative distributions such as 9legacy, 9atom (i386), 9front (i386), NIX (amd64) and ANTS (i386).

Some quality criteria:

Each directory (=port) should be an independently built entity and dependencies should be clearly stated.

Each port should at least, at any time, be buildable on Plan9 i386.

Binary redistribution of each port is made using 9front's pkg/create tool and targets the 386 $objtype. Third party package repositories, such as the 9front pkg repository or fgb's "contrib" are free to rebuild and redistribute the packages posted on this site if they want to. An alternative mirror of the binary downloads can be found at /n/sources/contrib/staal1978/pkg.

Ethics: This project tries to be as ideology-free as possible, which means that ports also of packages that might be frowned upon by most in the Plan9 community still are welcome. For licensing, there is no official preference and each port should respect upstream licensing as much as possible. For pragmatic reasons, liberal and permissive licenses are preferred over viral "strong copyleft" ones simply because there is a risk that a binary may be illegal to redistribute due to licensing conflicts, especially since all binaries on Plan9 are statically linked. This means that viral exclusive licenses (even weak ones like LGPL) in libraries are more dangerous than in end-user programs. So if possible, permissively licensed things are to prefer but that does not mean that the project is against copyleft per se.

Copyrights : Code changes made within the ports2plan9 project are always license-compatible with the parent project and in cases where the parent project requires the author to give up his or her copyright to a governing organization (like GNU projects under FSF), such permission is given implicitly. In the (unlikely) case that new code is written, it will be released under the Poetic license, which is legally equivalent to BSD, MIT or ISC.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is not to create "another Linux that is not Linux". If that is what you want, you probably are better off with one of the BSD operating systems. That being said, most ports will naturally be built and targetted against the ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). The idea behind this is not to make Plan9 more "unixy" but rather lower the thresholds for migration in various use cases. A "good" analogy could be how the Wine project helped desktop adoption of Linux and BSD operating systems when critical applications were not available. In contrast, the ports to APE are not specifically targetted at desktop adoption but could also be to lower the thresholds of getting Plan9 in the "back room" invisibly serving the world. Especially development tools and libraries are interesting since they have the potential to ease the porting of a wide range of other applications (whatever someone might need to use).

Mascot

Chosing a mascot is not always easy... here is an attempt:

The project mascot is Caesar (pronounced "Kaiser"), for the following reasons:

• A genetically engineered APE destined for world domination !
• Sci-Fi movie reference (common theme with Plan9)
• Tries to conquer an area currently held by a disorganized bunch whose names end with -ix (empowered by "getafix" ;))
• other stuff...

Graphical contributions welcome!