[9fans] open sores (was My view of Plan 9 and it's future)

[9fans] open sores (was My view of Plan 9 and it's future)

[geoff]

I am not a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center, where
Plan 9 was and is developed.  These opinions are not official
corporate statements.

I'll second Russ's and viro's comments.  Mr. Choate, you're not paying
attention, and you're apparently letting Open Source ideology drive
you to say some pretty absurd things, often contradicted by history.
(Your middle initial wouldn't be "N.", would it?  :-)

Open Source ``technology''', that is, letting everybody stick a finger
in the pie (or a ladle in the broth), is no guarantee of quality
software and I'd argue that it's quite the opposite, despite Eric
Raymond's `The Cathedral and The Bazaar' or whatever it's called.  Go
dig up a copy of TMNN (B News 3.0), the GNU/Linux cat command, or the
Linux Soundblaster driver if you want to see some pretty wretched code
produced by Open Source methods.  The only GNU software I've ever had
any respect for is groff, which was written by one person (James
Clark, in England), not the Cambridge GNU hive mind.  At least the
folks at Berkeley who produced the BSD distributions had the benefit
of access to the original well-written Unix source.  The people
writing GNU/Linux knock-offs have generally not had access to Unix
source and so are, at best, learning from reading BSD-Lite source or
if they are really unlucky, other GNU/Linux source.

Open Source seems implicitly to assume that all programmers are of
roughly the same skill.  This is obviously false, as observed by
Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming decades ago,
among others.  The Plan 9 developers are exceptionally talented,
experienced and modest as designers and implementors.  As a result,
they have received various medals, awards and other honours.  I hope
that they will pardon the blatant flattery.  To take a few examples,
Rob Pike seems to have rare, possibly unique, insight into window
systems and graphics, not to mention an unusual ability to distill
software into quite compact form.  With the possible exception of MGR,
I've never seen a window system written by anyone else that approaches
any one of Rob's for usability, compactness or elegance.  Wiser people
than I have said of Ken Thompson (quoting from memory): `Michelangelo
would have had to have been taught how *not* to sculpt.  So it is with
the great programmers.'  Ken's insight into file systems is
penetrating.  The number and severity of file system problems with
which the maintainers of other systems are still grappling, and that
Ken side-stepped in the Plan 9 file server, is impressive.  And of
course he created little things like Unix, B, the Plan 9 C compilers,
and at least some of 9P.  The skills of the Plan 9 developers extend
beyond design; you don't get the full benefit of their abilities by
reading the Plan 9 documentation.  Writing and debugging software,
especially kernels, for multiprocessors is harder than it looks.  Now
you *could* try to write a Plan 9 clone from scratch (let's call it
Battlefield Earth) but even if you somehow attracted fairly good
programmers, and they were able to spend all their free time (if any)
working on it for free, it would be hard to justify the effort on
economic grounds, so presumably the justification would be `freedom',
even compulsion, to give the software away.  When Unix source licences
were at least $20,000 for non-educational uses, and Minix and BSD-Lite
and Plan 9 and even Linux didn't exist, writing freely-distributable
commands and kernels (even if only clones of Unix ones) had some
utility.  At $350 for the real thing, I don't find this so compelling.
The VSTa people have already tried to write a clone, but I gather
progress has been slow, which isn't surprising: spare time is scarce,
PC hardware is vile, there's a lot of code to write from scratch, and
if you take shortcuts like using gcc instead of writing 2c, etc., you
reduce the quality, utility and certainly compactness of the result.

The 1995 Plan 9 release was a bargain by any measure.  The cheapest
Unix source licence that I know of was a V6 educational licence for
$500 in 1975 dollars; V5 may have been cheaper.  And that was 25 years
ago, before there was any significant networking or graphics code in
the standard Unix distributions.  The open sourcers who whinge about
the expense have nevertheless somehow acquired computers that have
until recently cost one or two thousand dollars, possibly more.  They
may even own multi-thousand-dollars cars (shock, horror).

As Russ said, Plan 9 is a research operating system and as pleasant
and productive as it is, Lucent (not AT&T) is under no obligation to
make it available to anyone.  I think that the terms under which
Lucent has offered Plan 9 to the public in the past have been very
generous.  Twenty-five years of operating system expertise were made
available in the form of a very usable operating system, with source,
for $350.  Admittedly, Linux costs less, but in this case at least,
you get what you pay for.  And, yes, it's galling that Windows
outsells Linux, which outsells Plan 9.  It could be a coincidence, but
the evidence seems to support the observation that quality and
popularity are inversely related.


Pardon the vitriol; I guess I've been more annoyed with the
know-nothing arrogance and sense of entitlement of some GNUers and
Open Sourcers (Sorcerers? apprentices?) than I had realised.

[9fans] open sores (was My view of Plan 9 and it's future)

[Douglas]

"Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
> Excellent article!

Sorry, that was meant for Geoff.  I'm having trouble with
the @#^&$! newsreader's user-fiendly interface.

[9fans] open sores (was My view of Plan 9 and it's future)

[Douglas]

Excellent article!