Sell me on Plan 9

[philw@plan9.bell-labs.com philw@plan9.bell-labs.com]

there is not and was not a Plan9 marketing plan.
We did some interesting RESEARCH and decided it
was worth releasing to allow people to experiment
with what we think is a very nice system.

We then applied alot of the ideas and technology
from Plan 9 to Inferno. We made something that will
become a product and will be supported by our company.

When the product group picks up inferno we will
return to doing operating system research in Plan9/Brazil
and I hope we will be able to continue to serve
up our work to an interested community. I expect
that much of the code and many of the ideas in inferno
will make it back into Brazil.

As an aside, I should like to point out that Plan 9
and inferno are different things and should not be
considered interchangable. I can see commercial
applications for both systems. As for Plan9 being
a beta, well thats essentially true - we spent
no money doing a release, we just pressed a CD.
The code has been in production at murray hill
for years as our main environment - I dont think
it is any more buggy than any major Unix system;
its just there is no support, so a community
of interested people fix and post patches - which
is a really nice way of doing business.

phil