[9fans] Plan 9 future (Was: Re: Are the Infernospaces gone?)

[Lucio De Re lucio@proxima.alt.za]

On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 04:32:57PM +0100, forsyth@vitanuova.com wrote:
>
> >>One possibility that comes to mind, though, may be to lobby the
> >>marketing people, if the engineers are willing to tell us who they
>
> i'd quite strongly advise keeping calm and quiet,

Well, that's what worked in the past, so far from me to stir, but
times have changed and the Open Source movement is acquiring quite
a lot of legitimacy and respect.

Unless I'm much mistaken, I see two fundamental problems with
releasing Brazil as a commercial product: (a) preparing the
distribution into a shrink-wrap format and (b) providing the support
that a paying public would be demanding.

On the other hand, setting up a CVS repository and assigning one
staff member to moderate source updates would, in my opinion, be
considerably simpler and hopefully within a moderate budget.  In
return, Bell Labs would get both feedback and improvements well in
excess of their investment.  If one then gets something like
StarOffice ported to the platform, the benefits become a lot more
visible.

I have little doubt that an Open Source Plan 9 would attract a lot
of attention, even if released in a very scrappy form.

Interestingly, it's the shrink-wrapping of Linux that's given Red
Hat the momentum to IPO, and it is not to be excluded that somebody
like David Butler may be able to invest the effort to do likewise
under a Plan 9 banner (David, I hope I am not insulting you :-).

The biggest hurdle, again strictly in my opinion, is the culture
of dealing only with large corporates that AT&T seems to have always
suffered from and no doubt Lucent has inherited.  Here it is hard
for me to offer any suggestions on how to surmount it.

Anyway, here's to a successful release.  Given the plummeting of the
South African currency against the US dollar, I sincerely hope the
release will be priced considerably below the US$ 350 I paid for it a
few years back (and I got a flawed manual, too :-(

++L