[9fans] The Good News

["G. David Butler" <gdb@dbSystems.com>]

Hello 9fans!

It has been a very interesting time in the Plan 9
world lately. I am very glad that Rob and friends
at Bell Labs have been able to accomplish the near
impossible by orchestrating the release Plan 9 as
Open Source. Bravo!

As you can imagine, the recent announcement suprised
me. But you wouldn't belive how much more my request
for a refund of the license fee I paid surprised the
software sales part of Lucent! Thankfully they agreed
that there was a "miscommunication" internally and
that they will process my refund ASAP. I'm glad I
don't have to go into the OS business just to use
the tools I want.

As an aside, I will not need to attend USENIX next
week, so if anybody would like to attend the general
session sponsered by db Systems (no strings attached),
please e-mail me. (It is too late for me to get a
refund for the conference fee.)

What now? I plan to integrate all the changes I have
made to V2 into V3 and supply them back to the Labs.
I believe many of the changes will not be "blessed"
(like my change of the semantics of the create(2)
system call -- it is still broken as far as I'm
concerned), so I expect I will have my own site that
supplies my derivative of the system and any compatible
changes. I may also start an Internet-based Plan 9
network if there is interest.  But beware, since my
changes include system call changes and 256 octet
name support in 9P, the Original Contributor system
will not work with my derivative.  My changes also
allow optimizations for large directories (indexes
and seek(2) support) and atomic 9P transactions via
logging on dedicated file servers (not via kfs).
These changes make a dedicated file server a database
server for most Internet-type applications.

I also plan to actively pursue a Java port...

Stay tuned!

David Butler
gdb@dbSystems.com