Re: [9fans] porting from vs. porting to Plan 9

["Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>]

What the whole industry really, really needs is for all
resources to be accessed through a clean but adequate
interface that has exactly the same access methods no
matter what the nature of the resource.  In other words,
devices all need to come from the manufacturers speaking
something like 9P.  This will never be achieved by hiding
in a corner hacking away at a niche OS, but could perhaps
be achieved eventually by more activism in the standards
realm, both de facto (e.g. Linux) and de jure (e.g. POSIX).
By letting other people determine the properties of such
interfaces you basically doom the most significant good
idea of Plan 9 to historical oblivion.

Inferno was an attempt at beginning to establish something
like what I have in mind, but it didn't have enough
impetus sustained on enough fronts over a long enough time
to have the desired effect.

Maybe the thing to do is seek out several of the smart
minds in Microsoft R&D, who are bound to see the problems
but might not have seen the solution, and engage them in
dialogues.  If you make enough impact, perhaps it would
begin moving the dominant OS line in the right direction,
eventually enabling protocol-compatible OSes with different
higher-level interfaces to compete.