>anyway, to ron's question, for those keeping score:
>Sun: released their stuff; recently acquired by Oracle.
>NeXT: acquired by Apple, ate it from within.
>MIPS: acquired by SGI. a smaller MIPS was then spit out when SGI
>realized Itanium was their future (oops).
>SGI: went backrupt, twice, then acquired by Rackable before the whole
>shebang was renamed sgi.
>i was going to say that having Plan 9 ported to your platform seemed
>like a bad omen for your company, but equally valid is the observation
>that being a platform vender (other than Apple) is bad for your
>company.

Last I had read, Rob Pike had tried several times to get SGI to allow the
release of their stuff, but they always said no.  I don't think any attempt
has been made since Rackable acquired SGI.  It still might be interesting
to see someday, since I thought I had heard that Bell Labs still has an SGI
Power Challenge running a 4th Edition kernel whose release is also barred
by the 2e NDA... Maybe it's been turned off for good by now, though...

-Ben