[9fans] Re: interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno

[ramkromberg@mail.com]

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Since I only used Plan 9 in a Virtual Machine I can only give a first
impression, but I suppose those are what counts when encountering
anything new, right ?

I think Linux and Windows control the Desktop and Servers market so plan9
can't penetrate that market, instead a niche market might redeem it, like
handheld devices which I think rio will do nicely with a touch screen, or
maybe routers switches and alike.

I think a programmers IDE is really important, coders are human too and
acme is simply uncomfortable to MS Visual C++ fresh out of collage, never
seen a linux outside the classroom programmers.

Maybe better documents ? its too hard to familiarize your self with a
system just by looking at the source code, some guides on device drivers
and working with rio should be prioritized as hardware support is most
important to the applications we want, and this applications want to
interact with the users we need :-)

Forum ! If plan9 is to be used, people have to know it first... It may
seem stupid but you wouldn't believe how many open source project have
been made and done by forums and the lack of them, developers will always
leave the project due to "real life" issues, and without a strong
following, projects simply slip into oblivion no matter how important and
necessary they are. In fact, many useless projects which has no
justification had been progressing quite nicely over the years due to a
fanatical fan base (the many p2p clients come in mind) have become
suddenly useful in the past couple of years.

If plan9 can reach students as part of OS design course instead of linux
their`s a good chance it will get more wide spread (PlanB?), this should
be possible because linux is really badly conceptualized and programmed
so a professor might prefer the well written code of plan9, unfortunately
professors are really busy people that won't try plan9 without a good
academic buzz around it - Care to write a paper ?

Overall I think Microsoft will start losing market share to linux in the
desktop market since many of my friends and I actually tried Vista only
to find ourself losing another good DVD+R :-), And thats where xBox comes
instead.
With all this moving around plan9 might find itself a place ? some anti
MS anti Linux willing party ready to embrace plan9 ? Apple did it... why
not someone else ? I know Sun got board with *unix :-) Maybe some unknown
Asian company ready to break the market with a cheaper then dirt
product... lol...

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