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[Elliott Hughes Elliott.Hughes@genedata.com]

i think you misattribute the reluctance amongst the youth of your acquaintance to
use Plan 9. i admit there were lots of people who gave up when typing 'vi' didn't
do what they expected, and when they found out that there wasn't anything like pine
and no way to 'talk'. but those were the sort of people 99% of whose computer use
consists of 'pine' and 'talk'. they're also smack-bang in the centre of the MS
target market, so we may as well forget about them.

there was more interest amongst the more technically inclined (though some of them
are damn hard to wean off vi) but as soon as they found that (a) they'd have to pay
to get the source and (b) they couldn't give away their work that was based on Plan 9,
they tended to lose interest. i know that i couldn't afford Plan 9 while i was a
student: it was only after i'd got a job that i forked out for it. i doubt very much
that if i hadn't been at your university, i'd have heard of Plan 9, let alone read
the papers and then bought it.

as long as FSF/Linux/FreeBSD stuff is free, and MS stuff is effectively free, i don't
think being better or more interesting or whatever helps one jot. the youth of today,
for whom i presume to speak, guessing that i'm the youngest 9fan, expects their
software to be free and to come with complete source, should they choose to hack
around with it. they also expect full (and fast) access to changes and the like: not
to be sat around wondering if they'll ever see Brazil.

and then there's the catch-22: the enticement of having users. no-one likes to write
software to push it to the back of their disc to rot (though i do wonder sometimes),
and the one place where you can be sure of users is the free world. if you can't
give your code away for free to run on a free platform, you're going to have fewer
users than if you could. and those users are less likely to be members of your
peer-group, because they, as we know, are all messing about writing emacs macros
and versions of tetris to run on VT100's.

but given that neither Plan 9 nor Brazil will be free, we may as well give up
complaining and be happy that we've seen the light. mind you, the question here
seems to be "will we see the second coming", which is rather appropriate at the
moment.

maybe when the religious nutcases run round killing each other, Plan 9/Brazil will
have its day, like the mammals that had to wait until the dinosaurs were out of
the way before they could come out of their holes and grow to respectable sizes?

-e