Re: [9fans] Closed nix development is an insult

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Sat, Sep 7, 2013, at 12:35 AM, Aram Hăvărneanu wrote:
> Everything is developed in secret without the involvment of any
> potential parties. Sure, everybody has the right to work in any way they
> like (except when the work is paid by public money), but you reap what
> youb sow. The lack of public interest in Plan 9 is due to this attitude.
> It has plagued the project from the very beginning.

I've always believed Plan 9's relative closedness is the reason we have
it as an example of a clean, well-designed operating system today. As
supporting evidence, compare OpenBSD, and contrast all the no-brain
rubbish being heaped up around Go. Theo de Raadt needs to be downright
nasty sometimes to keep the OpenBSD project from being swamped with
whiners and the reflex programming which keeps them quiet in the short
term but only feeds them in the long term. And sometimes the whiners'
own no-brain reflex programming.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like a hypothetical derivative of Plan 9 to
become popular. I just think that without a certain degree of
isolationism and NIH we would no longer have a design worthy of any
great interest. I think the relative closedness of Bell Labs has
achieved this very well, although of course if it were just two degrees
more closed we again wouldn't have this clean OS. 

The approach of publishing a fully maintained and working system but not
accepting crap, (as taken by OpenBSD and 9front,) generates much more
hate than the occasional license arguments over some closed relative of
the interesting if somewhat unmaintained system we have access to. In
#cat-v we almost every day have to talk down someone who wants something
broken, and a lot of the idiots get nasty. The guy who puts the most
care and politeness into his replies gets the most hate.

Apart from all that, there was a brief exchange on the subject of
getting Unix v10 in my favourite irc channel today, one which will
probably stick in my mind for a while.

A certain being said "this license crap is sickening."

I replied, "it's annoying, but i don't see how v10's source is more
important than plan 9."

The being responded by questioning what I meant by 'important'.

I was left staring at the screen in wonder, unable to comprehend what
relevance the question had to the subject. After a minute or so, I
thought I got a grip on it, and replied with this (grammar corrected):

"it would be nice to have additional examples of the workings of such
bright minds, but really there are more than a few such examples in Plan
9, and we have further examples in Go (esp. the initial release)."

To this, the entity replied to the effect that it wasn't about examples
of great minds, the only thing desired was the (apparently fornicating)
v10.

I asked why.

"historical interest. play around."

I.... what is this I don't even....... This... creature (child? doesn't
sound like one,) is "sickened" by his inability to get this thing just
to play with, with no indication that he has any desire to learn
anything from it or preserve it for posterity, or anything of any value
at all! I don't want to malign those who feel they would really benefit
from owning Unix v10, I just... had to relate this. I'm staggered. I
thought I had entitlement issues.