[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv]

Why is there no substantial in-depth technical discussion of Plan 9
engineering for distributed systems here?

I finally figured it out - because the people who are working on those
things, the professionals at IBM and wherever else, are forbidden by
contract to talk about the current work, and IBM and others are quite
eager to get as many patents as possible on all the amazing
possibilities of Plan 9/9P for building distributed systems and
supercomputers.

I call on the human beings who are the engineers at IBM and elsewhere
to make the human choice that Plan 9 is important to the world - a lot
more important than the BS of patents and the evils of NDAs which
restrict free flow of ideas and conversation between human beings.

TEAR UP THE NDAS!

BURN THE PATENTS!!

Stop trying to make the evolution of Plan 9 a patent-encrusted,
closed-source, corporate controlled industry.  Give it to the
hobbyists and the hackers and let it become the TRUE SUCCESSOR to unix
that it always should have been.

Non-disclosure agreements are a gross offense at the basic principle
that humans should be able to talk freely about their ideas, and that
all of us benefit from open communication.  I call for the complete
end to the use of NDAs in contracts for technical engineers, so they
can freely share ideas with the community, and freely receive ideas
back.

And stop with the patents, also.

Ben Kidwell "mycroftiv"

Let's have a free and unrestricted discussion of all the amazing
possibilities of Plan 9 and 9P based colony computing, and how
it can help the human race.

Peace and love.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[Richard Miller]

> Why is there no substantial in-depth technical discussion of Plan 9
> engineering for distributed systems here?

See this thread for a hint:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os.plan9/2PwnP0KfJ5A

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[vvs009]

> I finally figured it out - because the people who are working on those
> things, the professionals at IBM and wherever else, are forbidden by
> contract to talk about the current work

I don't think so. As disruptive as they really are, the patents and
NDA are not a culprit here.
Plan 9 suffers from small hobbyist community. The most professional
applications are
probably at LSUB and Vita Nuova. Engineers from Blue Gene project are
probably don't
read this list at all. There is just no critical mass to push Plan 9
into professional applications
market. It's not big enough (paradoxically) and Unix was already there
for many years.
Microsoft is very aggressive as well. But Plan 9 ideas has its impact
on design of other OSes.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[hiro]

> we're not nihlists.  we have rules.  ;-)

what have you smoked that brought such philosophical insight?

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[vvs009]

> effectivness isn't measured on an axis labled "1/age",
> nor is it measured on an axis labled "warm bodies".

Effectiveness is measured by impact on everyday life of many people.

> let's put an end to it now.

Whatever.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[erik quanstrom]

> People are not free to do everything what they want. They need to
> work, they have families and they have no free time at all. There used
> to be a community of young free hackers around Plan 9 but
> unfortunately it's not young or big enough.

effectivness isn't measured on an axis labled "1/age",
nor is it measured on an axis labled "warm bodies".

[earlier in the thread]
> Stop trying to make the evolution of Plan 9 a patent-encrusted,
> closed-source, corporate controlled industry.  Give it to the

if you're running plan 9 on modern pc hardware,
you likely use a driver contributed back by a company.

now, this thread is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, and
moderately off-topic.  let's put an end to it now.  this is
9fans.  we're not nihlists.  we have rules.  ;-)

- erik

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[vvs009]

After thinking about it, I doubt that the developers of commercial
applications are that interested in integration with others at all.
Don't they get paid for imprisoning your data inside their
applications?

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[vvs009]

> and actually believe that it is a real os for using in a serious way and
> working to receive the benefits from the full distributed architecture,
> not just the simple unix-heritage core.

I wish I could. But there are very sophisticated tools out there that
are perfectly suited for their task. Form the other hand, Plan 9 has
perfect integration facilities but lacks ready to use applications.
So, there is a dilemma: would you use an already written application
or would you write it from scratch? In a time constrained environment
it's often the former. In the research projects it could be the
latter, but how much research we are doing at work?

[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv]

vvs009 wrote:
> People are not free to do everything what they want. They need to
> work, they have families and they have no free time at all. There used
> to be a community of young free hackers around Plan 9 but
> unfortunately it's not young or big enough.

I think there is a hidden, and incorrect assumption here.  Underlying
this seems to be the idea that devoting time to Plan 9 will not return
real-world benefits to you to compensate you for the time spent.

I think this is untrue.  I think that Plan 9 has immense practical
value in comparison to other computer systems, but that the community
seems to be writing off the usefulness of their own operating system.

For instance, a well-organized venti-based data backup system making
use of multiple ventis and progressive use of wrarena seems to me to
be the absolute best system for backing up data.  Doing it with
appropriate replication means you need at least 2 ventis.  To get the
most benefit out of venti, you want fossil and flfmt -v so we are
already at 4 functional nodes (not necessarily boxes), but once this
system is in place

I think there is a lot more to Plan 9 than just research, or just a
nice simple unix-traditions os, or just hobbyism.  I think Plan 9 can
be a fire-breathing Data Dragon that gives you benefits you will
refuse to compute without, but the Plan 9 community - which so far as
I know, is pretty much just 9fans?  - needs to put down their macbooks
and their p9p and get back into the true beautiful operating system,
and actually believe that it is a real os for using in a serious way and
working to receive the benefits from the full distributed architecture,
not just the simple unix-heritage core.

Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"

[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv]

> As disruptive as they really are, the patents and
> NDA are not a culprit here.
> Plan 9 suffers from small hobbyist community.

This was exactly how I analyzed the situation myself - until I
randomly stumbled on United States Patent 8,380,765 for multi-pipes,
which completely changed my perceptions on this issue.

There is really no way to describe the fury and offense I feel at this
patent for an implementation McIlroy's original free pipe/array
concept as a synthetic fs of pipe-like files.

If I was a totally different kind of person, I could probably try to
file software patents based on my own work, since everyone knows its
just a matter of getting implementations of basic principles done in a
slightly new way and getting the patent put together so that its
specific enough to squeak by in comparison to other pre-existing
patents, but general enough to be used as a weapon against people
doing things which are merely similar.  That's why you pay the big
bucks to the lawyers.  I am not a lawyer, I am a law professor's son,
and he spent 30 years explaining to me exactly how the game works.

I was only vaguely batty before I discovered that "muxing pipes as a
9p fs with a granular control interface" as an implementation of
McIlroy's original concept for freeform grids and processing arrays is
something that IBM has now patented.

I highly doubt this patent is a lonely island in the sea.  I would
imagine that there are plenty more basic ideas in computer science
which can be redone as a 9p fs and then patented again.  The HARE
paper claims that one of the successul goals of the project was
raising the profile of 9p in the scientific community.

I have absolutely zero clue what Plan 9 related patents might be -
pardon the phrase - in the pipeline, but I think that the potential
growing relevance of 9P for commercial distributed applications might
have a lot to do with why we don't see more posts from people doing
work in that area.

Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[vvs009]

> You would
> think that if a random hippie from 4chan can love Plan 9 enough to
> figure out how to build a personal grid that smoothly integrates all
> these resources and keeps my data backed up and gives me the most
> wonderful computing environment in the world - so would those guys.

You have no obligations at work to meet - that's the difference. They
can't just do what they please and get paid. I know that things were
different at Bell Labs but they are working for Google now.

> I think it's lame that there aren't more people doing the same things
> I am, and building mid-to-large sized home/office grids.

People are not free to do everything what they want. They need to
work, they have families and they have no free time at all. There used
to be a community of young free hackers around Plan 9 but
unfortunately it's not young or big enough.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[mycroftiv]

> See this thread for a hint:

> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os.plan9/2PwnP0KfJ5A

I knew the outline of this but I hadn't read the exact thread.  The
idea that there is an either/or choice is ridiculous.  I would think
Rob Pike and RSC are plenty smart enough to run Qemu Plan 9 on a
random linux box and Drawterm in.  One decent linux server could run
Qemu Plan 9s for anyone in Google who wanted it, and they can Drawterm
in and have beautiful integration of Plan 9 with their native os.

How can RSC and Rob Pike not be doing the very simple things which
allow you to build a composite environment that has the strenghts of
both?  I have a mixed grid that has 4 native plan 9 boxes, 1 local
linux box, 2 remote linux boxes, and 2 remote plan 9 nodes.  You would
think that if a random hippie from 4chan can love Plan 9 enough to
figure out how to build a personal grid that smoothly integrates all
these resources and keeps my data backed up and gives me the most
wonderful computing environment in the world - so would those guys.

Hey, Original Plan 9 guys - I LOVE YOU BUT CMON HERE!!!

You don't have to go crazy like I did!  Just have google set up a
linux server of Qemu Plan 9 nodes and everyone has drawterm.  In fact
tell the Google guys they should use the 9queen.gz ANTS Qemu image
that is fully installed and ready to use, if they are lazy.

Anyway, it is truly shocking to me to see the totally false dichotomy
of "either/or" used by the Google guys to justify not making active
use of Plan 9.  Using Plan 9 doesn't mean giving up anything else,
because they made it network transparent!

Despite what the Google guys are up to, I am still quite confident
that there are some people somewhere in the world doing amazing things
with 9P, and then Not Discussing It Publicly, Especially Not With
Crazy Anti-Patent Hippies.

I think it's lame that there aren't more people doing the same things
I am, and building mid-to-large sized home/office grids. Even when
people don't want to track down native hardware, it isn't hard to
build a grid on one box with virtual machines to explore what Plan 9
does beyond the 4-node frontier, where things get truly magical as
multiple cpus share root and import all the important synthetic fses
to share things.

Plan Nine is worth going crazy over, people.

-Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"

Here's a poem for the p9pers at Google:

If you don't have a real namespace
Install Plan 9 or else lose face!
Time for revolution on the moon base
Plan 9 from Bell Labs to outer space