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