[9fans] My view of Plan 9 and it's future

[Jim Choate ravage@ssz.com]

Hi,

My intention is not to inflame or insite. If you disagree, fine. You're
entitled to your opinion. This is pretty much my final say on this issue
for the time being at least. Thanks for the feedback.

My view is that Lucent/Bell Labs has no intention of any sort of long term
or serious support for Plan 9. I further believe they intentionaly
prohibit commerical use *and* price it out of the general hobby market.
This guaranteeing that it won't be widely encountered.

The technology that is implimented in Plan 9 is more suited for the
Internet than Linux and Win systems. By remaining with these legacy
systems we actualy inhibit technology. That is a bad thing.

When you couple this with ubiquitious computing (a near term reality) the
process/file/i-o model is a wunderkin approach. Just imagine a packet
radio network over regular CB radio for example.

Plan 9's implimentation of crypto at low levels of the network offers
advantages to privacy that unix and Win based systems will never match.

Data havens and other distributed process/file_space applications will
always be inhibited by the unix and Win architectures.

When one looks at the advancement of the Internet with respect to
commercial OS'es and Open Source OS'es it is clear that one of them is a
technology driver, and it ain't the commercial systems. Look at the
increase in general unix skills compared through the 80's and the 90's.
What was the main force? Open Source software caused the entire market to
respond.

So long as Plan 9 is released under a commercial license and the primary
goal is to make money off the OS, instead of as in Open Source where it's
the distribution, training, support, and applications the money is to be
made, it will fail.

When one looks at Plan 9's support of Unicode and the increasing
non-English traffic it offers a solution to a problem that unix and MS
OS'es are only just now beginning to 'get'.

Under the current license Plan 9 will fail. One solution would be to keep
the non-commerical limit and lower the price to something like $99. I
don't believe that will prove an efficient enough strategy. Though it may
increase its use in schools and some more well healed hackers. It could go
with a Open Source license. In which case the development and user
community would most likely work similar to Linux. If Lucent/Bell want to
make money, they could distribute and support their own branded distro.
Would significantly increase the level of support and development over
their current pace.

The distributed process model offers me an enticing capability that
Beowulf just doesn't provide. The concepts of secure distributed BlackNet
data havens, anonymous remailers, public key servers, etc. are all
entirely too realisable with Plan 9 to let the basic ideas go belly up.

In a head to head between Linux and Plan 9, Plan 9 will kick ass and take
names. As users and supporters of Plan 9 our PRIMARY goal should be to
increase the user community of Plan 9. If that means a indy Open Source
initiative then so be it.

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