The Future?

[Brandon Black photon@nol.net]

While I'm thinking about plan 9 wishlists and such... wanted to get some
other thoughts and questions out of the way...

Bell Labs Guys (or anyone who really knows):
What does the future of Plan 9 look like, honestly?  Will it remain a mere
stepping stone on the way to Brazil, or, with enough user support, might
there possibly be future public releases?  If the whole question comes
down to user support.. it may be a chicken and egg problem... a second
public release with bugfixes and the "updates" from the first release
applied, with all the new drivers, etc.. would probably bring more users.
Likewise, the current release probably turns off many entry-level users
because of the difficulties they have installing it, or the lack of
hardware support compared to what they would have had after the patches
were applied.

I think (assuming plan 9 is not a dead project) that a second release say,
sometime in early-mid '97, with less bugginess (is that a word?) and more
hardware support would be a great step towards general public acceptance
of Plan 9 as a superior OS to the bloated remains of unix that abound in
all of the *nix's out there. 

Brandon