Re: [9fans] Re: Building GCC

[Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:26:56 EST Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com>  wrote:
> Plan 9 is not, and should not in my opinion, be a Linux
> replacment, Unix replacement, MS Windows replacement, and
> so on.  If you really want Plan 9 to dominate the world
> and see all your friends use it every day, invent a killer
> application for it.  That's the only way you can shove
> existing systems of their pedestals.

The zillion dollar question is what app would that be.  And
even if you build a killer app for plan 9, most people would
want it ported to their favorite OS.  Worse, the problem is
that the "platform" that matters to most people now is no
longer an OS (just as battles over which is the best
processor are now mostly past) -- this is why most killer
apps end up
a) being windows or OS X based,
b) being ported to multiple platforms (windows, OS X,
   Linux, FreeBSD, Symbian), or
c) living entirely in a web browser, with a server
   somewhere to provide/store the interesting bits.
d) bundled with a h/w gadget of some sort (iPod, SlingBox
   etc.)

May be Plan9 can be used to provide a webserver backend but
even here you have to work with existing solutions as people
don't want to reinvent everything. The benefits provided by
the plan9 model are simply not enough if you have to reinvent
everything. Working python, ruby, c++, PHP would go some way
toward fixing that.

Another possibilty is to use it in a h/w gadget that everyone
would want (for example building something like the Lego NXT
computer controlled brick so that you can build simple
robotic apps in rc).

All this assuming anyone wants plan9 to be more popular but I
don't know if there is even a majority that wants that (or
wants it badly enough to want to do something about it).

May be the problem is that people are treating plan 9 as a
Van Gogh masterpiece when they should be treating as building
material :-)