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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