"Thank you, I kind of got the idea that Plan 9 is an informal hobby/
research platform, and that the community contributes where they can,
unless its something serious like a new release (probably not up to
everybody)."

It's more than a hobby/research platform, although we sometimes say that to
save time explaining.
It has some non-trivial commercial application, for instance, partly
because it's small, malleable,
and generally tidy, and partly because several ideas (name spaces and 9P)
are especially fruitful when building
certain classes of distributed system.

It's informal in the sense that there isn't any one individual or group in
charge,
but the different groups working on Plan 9 have their own degrees of
formality and civility.

As Anthony Sorace said, there hasn't been a "release" as such since 2004,
because distribution
switched to frequent incremental updates over the Internet, in one way or
another.

The "Plan 9" trademark is Alcatel-Lucent's (for "operating system computer
programs").
It's good until 2017. Alcatel-Lucent also has a few patents relating to 9P
and various
aspects of the name space: 5,623,666 for example.