[9fans] quantity vs. quality

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

On Jun 7, 2006, at 6:07 PM, Latchesar Ionkov wrote:

> I don't think the Plan9 community has the resources (both in  
> numbers and quality) to continue the development. We need fresh blood.

No, we need fresh ideas.  An infinite number of monkeys turning Plan  
9 into Linux is not progress.

The latest copy of login (the Usenix newsletter) has an editorial  
lamenting how UNIX just doesn't fit the current one-user-one-machine  
paradigm we see today, and how we need to re-think how things are  
done in this regard.  Yet Plan 9 has already been doing this for over  
a decade.

Plan 9's "future" is in guiding the UNIX community forward, not in  
regressing back to what spawned it in the first place.  And I  
sincerely hope that doesn't happen by having Plan 9 be adopted  
wholesale by the masses, for that would (sooner or later) see the end  
of research and innovation for the sake of not breaking all the  
currently running apps, which is what caused UNIX to start growing  
mold.  I would much rather see Plan 9 stay small and mostly ignored,  
since that's how it will remain agile and pliable.  It's the *ideas*  
from Plan 9 (e.g. the servers, namespaces) that will help the masses  
morph their current environment into something suitable for the 21st  
century.

--lyndon