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

[Will Rose cwr@crash.cts.com]

Douglas A. Gwyn <DAGwyn@null.net> wrote:
: Jim Choate wrote:
:> My view is that Lucent/Bell Labs has no intention of any sort of
:> long term or serious support for Plan 9. ...

: They seem to have been willing to fund its development over many
: years now, with a lot of staff time redirected for a while toward
: the Inferno product development.

:> So long as Plan 9 is released under a commercial license and the
:> primary goal is to make money off the OS, ... it will fail.

: Plan 9 is a *research* platform, not a commercial product!
: I was happy to pay my $350 for the previous snapshot of Plan 9,
: including nice printed manuals, in order to do the "hobby" things
: you claimed it was too pricy for.

:> ... As users and supporters of Plan 9 our PRIMARY goal should be
:> to increase the user community of Plan 9.

: I disagree.  What we want is quality, not quantity.

I would obviously have liked Plan 9 to be cheaper, but I really can't
see it as expensive; and I _don't_ think it should be Open Source.  I
value it because it contains a lot of interesting ideas from experienced
system designers (and it's also fun to play with).  I don't want it given
over to a larger, less-skilled, group.  I'll definitely take quality
above quantity in this case; there are already enough 'quantity' OSes.

OTOH, I really, really wish the PC version used the standard partition
table in the conventional way...


Will
cwr@cts.com