The future of Plan9?

[Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org]

My 2c..,

I believe Unix's role has changed from experimental system
(it used to be small, consistant, well written and reasonably portable)
to the only surviving viable commercial alternative to the
Microsoft juggernaught..

As a result, Unix has bloated, and become subject to numerous standards,
so that even though sources for various versions are readily
available, it doesn't lend itself radical experimentation.
I don't begrudge it that - it was the only way those of us
wanting a commercially supported operating system could be
spared the horrors of the Microsoft monopoly. The latter having
proved how obsolete technology with a huge marketing budget
will win every time in a largely unsophisticated market.

So I see Plan 9 as a refreshing attempt to try to improve
technology, and experiment with new ideas, without worrying
about commercial viability. It probably isn't the 'operating
system for the masses', because while it can be used on a
standalone machine, it is very much a second class configuration.
And without the networking, a lot of its benefits (and some fairly
basic essentials, like security) are not realised.

It has a lot of great features, which I won't list because I
am sure I would be preaching to the converted. Its main failing,
in my opinion, is its inability to interact with other operating
systems conveniently. It is a bit like my understandingo of NT, 
which is multi-user if all the users have their own machine running
NT or MSWindows. Without X clients or support for cursor
addressing, it is very difficult to access and use from a non 
plan9 host, or to access a non-Plan9 host from Plan9. I know
this could be easily addressed by a tercap/terminfo port to
the APE environment, plus (with a bit more Plan9 experience) an
ANSI terminal emulation for 8.5. Adding to this the much mentioned,
but not available, X client libs and 8.5 server, would make it a much
less isolated system.

Computers used to be fun back in the days when operating systems
were as diverse as computer architectures.

I still live in hope that, because Microsofts offerings are SO poor,
a sufficently good alternative may one day supplant it. At least the
wealth of quality free software available on the net makes developing
alternate operating systems less of a daunting task than it used to
be - only the core has to be build, and a quite usable suite of
applications can be readily ported by a user community.

In summary, I don't see it catching on in the commercial market,
but I would like to see it develop an active user community of
technical people interested in operating systems, porting existing
applications and experimenting with new developments., 

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~cthulhu/