From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] commercial deployment
From: anothy@cosym.net
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Message-Id: <20010719192828.47A611998A@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 15:28:15 -0400
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//Is there or will there ever be commercial/industrial deployment of plan9?

short answer: yes, sort of.
long answer: that depends, what does that mean to you?

there are a number of people who use Plan 9 in their "day jobs", in industry or
commercial environments, even though those jobs likely have nothing to do
with plan 9. i did that when i admined Unix boxes, for example.

as mentioned a few times here, plan 9's been used in several projects in the
labs, like the VPN brick, that may someday see the light of day (hey, i'd buy
one of those if i could).

i believe somebody outside the labs was using Plan 9 in a hardware mpeg
encoder.  is that still going on? which edition?

and, of cource, the Plan 9 and Inferno development are done using it.

while Plan 9 still tends to think of itself as a research operating system, it's
certainly usable in production/commercial environments, and is quite stable -
perhaps moreso than many OSs that _do_ explicitly consider themselves
production quality.

nicely packaged Plan 9 sets - with the manuals and papers printed and nicely
bound and a CD with the distribution and various add-ons - are sold by Vita
Nuova, commercially.

the current license is much friendlier to commercial use than the 2nd edition
on (that is, it allows it at all). i can't figure out how to compare Plan 9's Open
Source license to the other Open Source licenses (cough*GPL*cough) in terms
of suitability for commercial use without risking a flame war.

there is not, however, industry support for Plan 9 the way there is for other
OSs, either in terms of hardware vendors explicitly supporting Plan 9 drivers
or providing such themselves, or in terms of commercial software vendors
writing for Plan 9. nor can you get Plan 9 pre-installed on a new PC (AFAIK).
-α.