plan 9 and other operating systems

[Victor Yodaiken yodaiken@sphinx.cs.nmt.edu]

On Apr 7,  5:43am, forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk wrote:
 Subject: plan 9 and other operating systems
>i recently replied to a question about how plan 9 compared to Linux.
>this prompted an important addition from rob, and comments from several
>others.  whilst i was considering the question further last night,

I have one serious comment. Linux is a mess, but A) it works, and
B) it is totally unencumbered, and C) it has a large and active
distributed free support system. While I am happy to have access
to Plan9 and look forward to the new release, I am reluctant to 
rely on it in for educational purposes because of the sorry history
of access to UNIX. Suppose we organized an ongoing o.s. research
group and developed new facilities (say real-time or fault recovery)
starting from the ATT code. Would we find ourselves in the same
situation as Berkeley -- without the extensive legal staff of the
UC system? This is not a complaint -- I realize that the folks
at ATT research have little control over coporate legal policy.
But, I did want to explain why some of us litigation-shy folks are
tempted by Linux despite the poor coding and sloppy design.