From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <-L-dnalbzpe7Rw2iRVn-sw@comcast.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: , Subject: Re: [9fans] porting from vs. porting to Plan 9 Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:33:11 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 73d5e93e-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.