The future of Plan9?

[Eric Dorman eld@jewel.ucsd.edu]

On Tue, 29 Apr 97 16:28:28 PDT, Alex Bochannek <abochann@cisco.com> wrote:

>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.

  I personally have tired of fighting the old battle with
"standard" unix configurations.  Unless I clog up the network
with weird nfs hierarchies (which our netcom guys will certainly
bitch about) I have to make changes to individual machines 
remotely then reboot them rather than making _one_ change on
_one_ fileserver.  And what about multiple architectures?  I've 
got Sun-Solaris, Sun-SunOS, SGIs, HPPAs, and (god forbid) NT4.0 
boxes.  All these machines have to be coherent all the time, as 
the people who use them are basically computer illiterate.  Ghod, 
it's alot of work.  The central idea of Plan9 with a *single* 
unified structure for all architectures is intensely appealing.

  Unfortunately we cannot use Plan9 since it lacks support
for the hardware we have (weird multihead framebuffers, Sun 
Sparc5s and Ultras, etc) and we can't afford the initial 
time/cost expenditure to make it work.  We can't even get
the specs for the two-headed framebuffers we use.  Godamn
proprietary nonsense.
 
>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.

  I think a real big problem with 'hobbyist involvement' is
(as rcannings(?) points out) is that $350US is a bit of a chunk
for a hobbyist to plunk down for the distribution.  They've
got to be a *serious* hobbyist :)  The real, working, *BSd
and Linux distributions are free (ignoring the old "You get what
you pay for" adage 8) ) and are much more attractive, not to
mention more familiar.

  What would be _very_ interesting would be using Plan9 in an 
academic lab in CS or EE, where Plan9 would provide the platform
upon which experiments in (may favorite) network engineering
could be done.  This exposes many more people to Plan9 that would
otherwise be stuck with a unix experience, and allow more people
to work on it without having to individually eat the $350 charge.
Plan9 is hamstrung in a single-machine mode; in a network lab 
Plan9 can really shine. 

Eric Dorman
Department of Radiology, Thornton Hospital, UCSD
edorman@ucsd.edu