[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com]

> As disruptive as they really are, the patents and
> NDA are not a culprit here.
> Plan 9 suffers from small hobbyist community.

This was exactly how I analyzed the situation myself - until I
randomly stumbled on United States Patent 8,380,765 for multi-pipes,
which completely changed my perceptions on this issue.

There is really no way to describe the fury and offense I feel at this
patent for an implementation McIlroy's original free pipe/array
concept as a synthetic fs of pipe-like files.

If I was a totally different kind of person, I could probably try to
file software patents based on my own work, since everyone knows its
just a matter of getting implementations of basic principles done in a
slightly new way and getting the patent put together so that its
specific enough to squeak by in comparison to other pre-existing
patents, but general enough to be used as a weapon against people
doing things which are merely similar.  That's why you pay the big
bucks to the lawyers.  I am not a lawyer, I am a law professor's son,
and he spent 30 years explaining to me exactly how the game works.

I was only vaguely batty before I discovered that "muxing pipes as a
9p fs with a granular control interface" as an implementation of
McIlroy's original concept for freeform grids and processing arrays is
something that IBM has now patented.

I highly doubt this patent is a lonely island in the sea.  I would
imagine that there are plenty more basic ideas in computer science
which can be redone as a 9p fs and then patented again.  The HARE
paper claims that one of the successul goals of the project was
raising the profile of 9p in the scientific community.

I have absolutely zero clue what Plan 9 related patents might be -
pardon the phrase - in the pipeline, but I think that the potential
growing relevance of 9P for commercial distributed applications might
have a lot to do with why we don't see more posts from people doing
work in that area.

Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"