From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <85efec7287ca2c788ada180639052e5e@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno
Date: Fri,  9 Mar 2007 06:46:01 +0200
From: lucio@proxima.alt.za
In-Reply-To: <13426df10703081355y3cc3f4a8h744ca056b9c9c26d@mail.gmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1cd40282-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> By 1993 Sun and other companies had made it impossible to get OS
> source. The vendors, who owned the clustering space at the time, cut
> their own throats by refusing to release source. People voted with
> their feet. Sound familiar? :-)

Yes, but the tune I hear in South Africa's business community today is
not greatly concerned with Open Source, it is concerned with
continuity.  I probably saved my primary client a few million Rands
(say a million US dollars) in licence fees and hardware costs in the
nearly twenty years I have consulted for them, but they will probably
spend it all (they have alredy spent most of it, I believe) to catch
up with their peers all of whom run Windows.  Why?  Because they
believe than no matter how large the costs, it is cheaper than to
depend on my skills, that after they have effectively refused to allow
me to train anyone in their organisation to replace me or even
tobecome familiar with the software I have supplied (NetBSD and a
hundred or so shell scripts for administration, one or two C programs,
a growing base of Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL applications), a "saving" I am
not including in my estimate.  So they believe that Windows will
"liberate" them from this dependency and I have no arguments to save
them from themselves.  In fact, any arguments I have would seem to be
in the opposite direction.

I could have run at least some of their needs on Plan 9: just Fossil
and Venti would have provided them with a backup facility that much
more closely matches their operation.  But they are not willing to pay
the cost of research nor the risk of failure, so they have to do
without.  Thing is, they would not understand the difference and
therefore would still want to migrate to what they like to call
"industry standard".

Apropos of Plan 9, the matter is that my client, like most "users",
are terrified of being different.  They believe in the comfort of
"convention".  Plan 9 isn't for them, not yet, possibly not ever.  But
some people buy Ferraris even though there are very few mechanics that
can look after them.  They know that what they want doesn't come
cheaply and are willing to pay for it.  I would far rather Plan 9
presented itself as the Ferrari of operating systems (after all, it's
the F40 that has a piece of steel cord in a nylon pipe to open the
door from the inside, isn't it?) than that it aimed itself at my
client's staff whose ignorance concerning computing is frightening.
Let them have Windows, if that's what they want.  And if Linux
(specially UBUNTU) is capable of filling the middle-class slot,
magnificent, too.  But to see where computing could be, you have to
look at the operating systems that didn't become mundane: Plan 9
first, QNX, BeOS, no doubt some others.

++L

PS: The Ferrari analogy is new to me.  But I think its aptness is
real.