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

[Christopher Browne cbbrowne@news.isp.giganews.com]

Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when Jim Choate would say:
>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.

Regardless of intent, your comments _are_ inflammatory and appear
intended to incite flames.

>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.

Fine, that's your view.

I don't think they _care_ all that much about Plan 9, from the
perspective of "Lucent, the umpteen-bazillion dollar company."

As "intellectual assets" go, I would spectulate that Plan 9 weighs in
at the "under $100M mark," which makes its importance in the overall
scheme of Things At Lucent rather small.  (If I were off by a factor
of 10, it would _still_ be pretty small potatos.)

If I'm wrong about that, I expect it is more out of ignorance of the
"true value" on the part of the organization on the part of the PHBs
way up in the organization than any direct intent to "prohibit
commerical use."

Compare to Xerox, whose PARC labs were largely responsible for
inventing such things as Postscript, Ethernet, WIMP GUIs as we know
them, and such.  If you looked at how many Dorado and Star machines
Xerox sold, and pricing, you'd be readily able to make the _same wrong
conclusions_ about Xerox.

>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.

.... Which misses that UNIX has gotten "retrofitted" with a whole lot
of interesting things over the years ....

>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.

If it was Eric Raymond saying this, people might take the comments
_somewhat_ seriously.  (Others of us would hold our noses and hope
he'd shut up.)

>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 think you're under the impression that Lucent has a "Plan 9
Marketing Division."  It doesn't.  Plan 9 is a _research_ OS, and they
are really only "pushing" it at researchers, who have rather different
sets of priorities and values than you seem to be projecting on
them.

It's interesting to see that there seems to be some new activity
surrounding Plan 9; I would speculate that this may be another
evidence of us coming out of the Long Dark Night of OS Research
Pessimism.

In the 1990s, Microsoft bought out various OS research groups, and
spent rather a lot of money making it look like there was little point
to OS research.

I would be entirely unshocked if the higher-ups at Lucent that hold
purse-strings looked at the money and research staff flows, and
concluded that this was Not A Good Time To Deploy Another OS.

The growth of Linux has provided some new interest in UNIX, as well as
getting the market used to the idea that there Might Be Alternatives
To The Microsoft Hegemony.  Which opens up the potential for other
OS research to bear fruit.
--
"Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable." -- Alan Perlis
cbbrowne@hex.net- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/oses.html>