From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <464B0B50.2030805@conducive.org> Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 21:46:56 +0800 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Warning: Rant. Please disregard. [Was: Re: [9fans] Is IBM ThinkPad R60e notebook compatible with Plan9?] References: <32a656c20705120143x3d461611t5a5abe9378bc2a13@mail.gmail.com> <4649EA4C.2050809@iontrading.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6867aeba-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Robert Sherwood wrote: > More than that; hobbyists, however enlightened, cannot provide continuing > funding for Plan 9 development. Witness current hardware support. Plan 9 > has > to grow or eventually die. > The overall 'computerish' and network worlds are now large enough that even a very small niche can remain viable. So I don't know that plan9 has to 'grow' as much as it has to be seen as 'of value' and still an environment where ideas are put into practice that are NOT done [well | at all] elsewhere. Much as is the case with a fair number of 'embedded' OS. IOW - it has to be seen as 'useful' to enough folks - be they students, researchers, purely experimenters, or pragmatists with specialized 'real world' (read 'commercial') applications not as well served with other tools. Whether it [still | ever ] [does | did ] any/all of those things is a separate issue from mass popularity or 'growth'. That said - I have not personally detected a particularly 'comfortable' level of published evidence in that direction. Even Vita Nuova's news releases seem few and far between, as if maintenance of a legacy base and a design-win every few *years* is all that is going on. Bill