The future of Plan9?

[Alex Bochannek abochann@cisco.com]

As a long-time friend of Plan9 and someone who purchased the Plan9
license back in '95, I found all this discussion from a couple of
weeks ago very interesting.

I personally have been very intrigued by Plan9 ever since I first
heard about it and was hoping to be able to spend some time with the
system but never really had the chance to do so.

All this talk about "What's happening with Plan9?" and "How about
Brazil?" left me wondering what the community really is hoping to get
out of these developments. From Bell Labs' eh, I mean Lucent's
perspective, things are pretty clear. Their primary focus right now is
a commercially viable system that will bring in some revenue. Plan9 is
not it and Brazil won't be it either. That's were Inferno comes in and
anybody who hangs out at the Inferno mailing-list knows, most
discussion there has been about commercial aspects of the system
lately.

So, the question is: Where to from here? It appears to me that the
people who do stuff with Plan9 (mostly academic and hobbyists) can't
really get a grip on what it is they want out of it. Is it a learning
system? A home system? A commercial system? Whatever it is, it
attracts people from different parts of the World with different
interests. People who, for some reason, don't feel like tinkering
around with *BSD, Linux or commercial OS's.

OK, now, let's have some discussion here as to where you want to go
with Plan9 (reference to Microsoft commercial unintentional ;-)
Personally, I am hoping that there are people out there who are seeing
a real opportunity in Plan9 as a great way for hobbyists to get
involved again in what used to be dominated by them and is now
completely industialized. What I am referring to are the early days of
the microcomputer revolution where people had a real sense of communal
belonging and it was the hobbyist who pushed the technological
envelope.

Before I start going off on some weird techno-sociological tangent, I
think I should stop here and open the floor for discussion.

Absolutely not speaking for my employer....

> > I, too, am curious about the disposition of Brazil.  I actually got
> > some funding approved for Plan 9 here at MIT (I'm part of a student
> > ...
> > Is there an `official' answer?  Is there an unofficial answer from
> > someone who has put more effort than I am into trying to get an
> > official answer?
>  
> here's an unofficial answer.
>  
> we've been working on other things for the past year or so,
> so there has been little new work on brazil.  phil and rob
> and dave say that they want to get back to working on
> brazil, but we don't know when that will be.
> 
> our plan 9 system is only used to access the old worm for archival
> purposes.  our new file server contains only the brazil source
> tree, so brazil is our current development system.  brazil is not
> in a state that is releasable, so i doubt that there will be
> a brazil release in the foreseeable future.
> 
> of course, all of this could change in a wink.

--
Alex Bochannek                 Phone & Fax : +1 408 526 51 91
Senior Network Analyst         Pager       : +1 408 485 90 92
Engineering Computing Services Alpha Pager : (800) 225-0256 PIN 104536
Cisco Systems, Inc.            Email       : abochannek@cisco.com
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San Jose, CA 95134-1706, USA