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From: "Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>
To: 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9 in Brazil
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:52:28 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87684ac5-639f-4fe7-8554-02e41009d044@www.fastmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20FC18E5C59C4F6B76DD591B43654668@eigenstate.org>

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020, at 10:30 PM, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> > I really don't understand why Plan 9 has not been adopted. Legacy base?
> 
> Porting software is expensive and time consuming. Unix
> mostly works. On top of that, Unix has many features.
> Bolted on in ways that don't fit, but features that
> aren't provided by Plan 9 tools, nonetheless.
> 
> When given a familiar but ugly environment with more
> features, which requires less work to get their familiar
> software running, what do you expect the result to be?

I agree, and add to all that the fact that Linux was popular and well-regarded many years before Plan 9 became open-source. Plan 9 was not only expensive, but IIRC hardly available before it was open-sourced in 2000. 

Also, denial of a serious bug in Fossil must have contributed to crushing what little chance Plan 9 had in this century. It took over 10 years to fix a serious data corruption bug which affected most, perhaps almost all new users. What commercial developer or balanced hobbyist would put up with that? For some perspective, see mycroftiv's mail: [9fans] notes on fossil, ANTS, and 9front/Bell labs controversies. He put a lot of effort into working around failure of the root filesystem. I'm sorry for the part I've played in contributing to the Plan 9 attitude problem, and I'm glad to see it has faded away.

With the attitude problem gone and some corporations developing new, non-unix operating systems, I think Plan 9 could well become more popular than it's ever been.

  reply	other threads:[~2020-09-01 11:52 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-05-02  8:52 Iruatã Souza
2020-05-02 16:31 ` [9fans] " Robert Sherwood
2020-08-29 17:25   ` Leonardo
2020-08-29 17:43     ` Wes Kussmaul
2020-08-29 18:36       ` Leonardo
2020-08-29 19:51         ` Wes Kussmaul
2020-08-29 21:10       ` Kurt H Maier
2020-08-29 19:54     ` Iruatã Souza
2020-08-29 21:03       ` Lucas Francesco
2020-08-29 22:09         ` Iruatã Souza
2020-08-31  2:52         ` Leonardo
2020-08-29 21:19       ` Lucas Francesco
2020-08-29 22:04         ` Iruatã Souza
2020-08-30 16:53       ` Leonardo
2020-08-30 19:40         ` Iruatã Souza
2020-08-31  1:29           ` Leonardo
2020-08-31  1:32             ` Kurt H Maier
2020-08-31  2:03               ` Leonardo
2020-08-29 21:30     ` ori
2020-09-01 11:52       ` Ethan Gardener [this message]
2020-09-01 12:10         ` hiro
2020-09-01 12:19           ` Ethan Gardener

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