[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com]

vvs009 wrote:
> People are not free to do everything what they want. They need to
> work, they have families and they have no free time at all. There used
> to be a community of young free hackers around Plan 9 but
> unfortunately it's not young or big enough.

I think there is a hidden, and incorrect assumption here.  Underlying
this seems to be the idea that devoting time to Plan 9 will not return
real-world benefits to you to compensate you for the time spent.

I think this is untrue.  I think that Plan 9 has immense practical
value in comparison to other computer systems, but that the community
seems to be writing off the usefulness of their own operating system.

For instance, a well-organized venti-based data backup system making
use of multiple ventis and progressive use of wrarena seems to me to
be the absolute best system for backing up data.  Doing it with
appropriate replication means you need at least 2 ventis.  To get the
most benefit out of venti, you want fossil and flfmt -v so we are
already at 4 functional nodes (not necessarily boxes), but once this
system is in place

I think there is a lot more to Plan 9 than just research, or just a
nice simple unix-traditions os, or just hobbyism.  I think Plan 9 can
be a fire-breathing Data Dragon that gives you benefits you will
refuse to compute without, but the Plan 9 community - which so far as
I know, is pretty much just 9fans?  - needs to put down their macbooks
and their p9p and get back into the true beautiful operating system,
and actually believe that it is a real os for using in a serious way and
working to receive the benefits from the full distributed architecture,
not just the simple unix-heritage core.

Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"