From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:42:31 MST."
	<13426df10703062242q3cdc421fnb45a5e6342b8b5ee@mail.gmail.com> 
From: Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>
Date: Wed,  7 Mar 2007 00:28:53 -0800
Message-Id: <20070307082853.B8B0C5B63@mail.bitblocks.com>
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1959c92a-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> I actually agree with your points in many ways. I just don't know how
> to get around the problem of showing this system to people. It's such
> a powerful system, and it drives me crazy when the first reaction is
> "I don't like that GUI". I'm talking BEFORE I've typed anything in the
> little window. These are not dumb people. But they have work to do,
> and they don't see that climbing the learning curve is worth it.

Would it make sense to to add something like openGL to plan9?
Then may be one can write a 3D-ish wm with all sorts of
eye-candy.

Alternatively don't even show them rio.  Just bolt-on a
webserver to plan9 and access the system via a browser.  Use
javascript to provide better interactivity.  Sure it sucks
but it gets them past the initial hurdle and they just may
stick around long enough to see the beauty of plan9.

> There's lots of stuff missing, as I pointed out at other times, in
> other notes. A lot of things that are missing are needed to get
> continued $$$ to keep things going. As jmk pointed out some time ago,
> plan9.bell-labs is supported in part by DOE, but at some point, if we
> can't show certain things, then the money goes away. The recompete
> happens this summer.

When Jolitz disappeared after releasing 386bsd, a group of
volunteers maintained it with a patchkit and later formed what
became FreeBSD.  The group grew by and large because of
a) user interest in *BSD,
b) developer interest,
c) a structure that welcomed and mentored new developers,
d) new ideas were encouraged, tried out and added to the in
   official codebase if found useful or they atrophied and
   got excised.
e) a port system for packages people found useful.

Seems to me something like the FreeBSD group setup can be
very useful for adding missing bits and evolving plan 9 but
somehow a critical mass has to form.

> The isses of Python and gcc are not simply academic. They're part of
> the DOE meal ticket.

So why not add them? If necessary setup an alternative site
for such things.  Colo space is cheap.

> Users matter ... 
...
> So, yeah, users can be frustrating, but they are your meal ticket.

No disagreement from me. 

> Saying "fuck em" only works just so long -- as you may have noticed,
> most of the Plan 9 guys are at google, running large Linux clusters
> ... and I believe many of them carry macos systems around now.

I have to admit, macos is pretty easy to use and a lot of
things just work without any fiddling.  They've done a very
job of integration.