First of all, I have my own fork of plan9 which was/is used by a few hundred users.

My fork is based on 9legacy. And I'm really surprised to regularly see this discussion about a 'mainline' and the argumentation against 9front. Fact is : 9legacy provides patches and enhancements from 9front. I don't have a problem with those back ported code which is distributed under an MIT license.

I don't use 9front or 9legacy directly but for some time now my own forked systems with different gui (desktop), editors, fontsystem, filesystem and a different coding style cause I prefer object oriented programming with C made possible with a preprocessor which translates to C.

I'm not part of 9front neither of 9legacy. I'm following the 9front mailing lists for bug reports or announcements of code interesting enough to port to my system. Some improvements in 9front especially regarding drivers and support for hardware are worth the effort to run a diff and port changes to my system. 9front has a large user group and its natural that needs of such a large community improve hardware support. I use code imported by 9legacy for booting which simplified my fork and made booting on modern hardware possible.

If 9legacy is the so called 'mainline' then 9legacy uses also back ported code from 9front. 9legacy is not 4e and it contains code enhancements from other forks of plan9 too.

4e is the last official release, 9legacy provides patches and enhancements back ported from forks of plan9. In my opinion 9fans is a meeting point not only for users of plan9 4e but also everyone who uses a fork of plan9. All forks share some code with varying amounts.

I have my own fork and you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the desktop or the boot screen that my fork is based on plan9, 9legacy, 9front as a user if this information wasn't placed due to the MIT license. My system is based on ideas code from plan9, 9legacy, 9fork and indirectly on code from other forks which were back ported by 9legacy this makes me part of the 9fans community like all those who are using plan9 directly or in the form of a port.

The owner of plan9 4e - Nokia - relicensed plan9 under an MIT license. Using, forking, changing, distributing plan9 following this new license is something everyone can decide by him-/herself. No one needs any kind of approval from anybody as long as you fulfill the license clauses.

My fork is based on plan9 - dot - 9front is based on plan9 - dot - 9legacy is based on 9legacy - dot and this is true for all forks which are related with plan9. By the way the original coders of plan9 also created a fork inferno. All forks are related with plan9. 9fans is a board where those interested in plan9 and its forks can meet an discuss. Whenever I need some information about problems existing in plan9 code I search for earlier posts on this mailing list, when I don't find relevant information I search the mailing list of 9front and others to find hints for solving the problem.

I don't like this discussion about 'mainline' and forks on this list. plan9 is MIT licensed and can be used in its original form (if possible on modern hardware) or as a fork. Everyone can fork it and use it as he or she sees fit.

I don't use 9front directly and sometimes discussions with people from 9front get irritating but this doesn't change the fact that they have a fork which is based on plan9 with a very good code quality that resembles the original form to an extent that it can be back ported with very small effort. Okay sometimes the effort gets bigger but thats the price you have to pay if you create your own fork and try to use code from another fork.

I don't know any members of 9front by person never met any of them. But I don't like the way some on this board are discriminating people who have forked from plan9 or use forked versions. Who do you think you are ?

Even the authors of plan9 forked plan9 or wrote user level software for systems to simulate plan9. If forking or changing the way to use plan9 is a crime and the evidence to justify to expel people from the plan9 or 9fans community who is still part of this community you envisioned (Don). After reading your messages you have also committed this crime by porting plan9 to systems not originally part of the 4e distro. You had to change enhance the code to make it run on new hardware not sharing it doesn't change the fact you made those changes so war you to expel from this message board ? The original authors changed code for their for inferno. They changed code between releases (9P --> 9P2000, ...), they changed even the gui between releases 8 1/2 ==> rio aso. Changing code is no crime as forking isn't thats the way software evolves. If you are a programmer and need changes you code the changes if you can't integrate those changes to the sources than you just created a fork. And as we all know plan9 4e was the last official release of plan9 it needed patches it needed changes to run on new hardware so everyone who changed the original sources created forks for themselves. Some people saw a necessity to cooperate and started forks like 9front to profit from a shared code base. Others started looking for patches which could be back ported to the plan9 4e release like 9legacy team (David - great job by the way). But this doesn't change the fact 9legacy is nothing else than a fork. Calling 9legacy 'mainline' and discriminate 9front and other forks is laughable cause 9legacy uses code changes from almost every shared fork of plan9 of importance.

You can't be serious while calling code from 9front messy and talk about not trusting them while you call 9legacy/9pio 'mainline'. If the code is messy and not trustworthy you shouldn't use 9legacy too cause a large amount of changes in this set of patches is based on code from 9front or other forks.