This whole discussion has devolved into a political left vs. right like
debate.  Suffice it to say that without a critical mass of users, Bell Labs
and/or Alcatel-Lucent will drop it, it will experience insufficient support
from the user base at large, and it will suffer bit-rot until it won't boot
anywhere anymore.

Here is an exercise for fun too.  Create your own written language, and
write a bunch of books in it.  Have fun.

Blake



On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 2:17 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:

> > "major piece among many" can be more precisely stated as "many pieces
> among
> > many in order for the platform to achieve a critical mass of users".
>
> the metaphor "critical mass" is really tiresome one.  it does not apply
> to operating systems.  if one person finds the os useful, then that's
> enough.
>
> i'm not entirely clear how this metaphor is supposed to be interpreted, but
> perhaps the idea is that with lots of users, lots of software gets written
> and
> clearly more is better.
>
> or maybe not.  plan 9 is a research system.  for me that means we use it as
> it makes doing new and interesting things, or the same thing in an
> interesting
> way easy.  so having piles of ported software is at best a distraction.
>
> - erik
>
>