From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <87668ly8tn.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: , <20011108094013.I28798@cackle.proxima.alt.za> Subject: Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?) Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 10:40:13 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 191ad2ea-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 lucio@proxima.alt.za (Lucio De Re) writes: > A lot of same criticism seems to point to a desire to see Plan 9 > gain its rightful position in the operating system marketplace and > the unfairness of it having to compete with obviously inferior > products with greater market share. I can't speak for the evils of Redmond. But a clear reason that Plan 9 is beaten out by GNU/Linux is that the latter is a free operating system, and always has been, and Plan 9 isn't and never was. > At the core, I have always believed that we can draw on the broad > developer community for further development, mainly because that > is all I can contribute to Plan 9 myself. The broad developer community you can hope to draw from is, more or less, committed to free software. I would turn around tomorrow and run Plan 9 nearly exclusively if it were free software, and I'd spend effort making it as good as possible. But it's not free software, so I won't. And there are *many* people who share the same ideals. Those people contribute to systems like the GNU/Linux distributions and the various *BSD systems. Thomas