Re: [9fans] Plan 9 in Brazil

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 01:43:49PM -0400, Wes Kussmaul wrote:
> 
> On 8/29/20 1:25 PM, Leonardo wrote:
> > I really don't understand why Plan 9 has not been adopted. Legacy base?
> 
> By giving a lot of control to the user Plan 9 and its derivatives 
> undermine the Silicon Valley business model, which is built upon 
> breaking into your information home, taking your personal intellectual 
> property, and putting it on their balance sheets as a money making 
> asset. In other words, burglary and theft.

I'm with you on the topic of the ethical void rampant in a lot of SV
tech companies, but this take is off the mark.  SV businesses trade on
convenience; it's only late-stage multinationals that attempt to
leverage monopoly to remove user control.  Fortunately by that stage
they're poorly enough run that internal competition leads to senescense
and new challengers introduce choice again.  It happened to Nokia,
IBM, Microsoft, and it's currently happening to Google, but all of them
got to that late stage by selling stuff people wanted, not alone by
being jerks.

The new model is to burn venture capital to get that market control, 
but the same principal applies:  by the time you're big enough to exert
sufficient force to exploit a monopoly, you're sufficiently large that
internal competition prevents you from operating efficiently.  

I think AT&T's sense of entitlement regarding their IP, combined with
the fact that Plan 9 was never presented as a consumer-facing product
(it was a research platform) had more to do with any lack of uptake.  In
other words, had it proved popular, the vultures would have arrived and
done the same things they do on most platforms.  In this case, better
roosts had appeared by the time Plan 9 became something the vultures 
considered to be worth exploiting.

I am grateful to the people who put effort into letting us have the code
regardless of whatever we might imagine their motivations are.  I'm glad
we have access and that the access we have lets us shoot for whatever
targets align with our priorities.

khm