Re: [9fans] Private Namespaces for Linux

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, David Gordon Hogan wrote:

> I'm just saddened that people are shoe-horning isolated ideas from
> Plan 9 into old, outdated systems, rather than comprehending the
> full elegance of Plan 9 as a complete system, and lending their
> support to it.

Life is like that sometimes. I tried very hard to lend my support 10 years
ago. I tried like crazy to get Plan 9 at the Supercomputing Research
Center. Since the SRC was at the University of Maryland Science and
Technology Center, at one point I tried sending letter head with "U.
Maryland S&T Center" to see if Bell Labs would sort of ignore the fact
that I wasn't *really* at the U. Maryland. No good. I spent two years
sending letters to lawyers. I finally decided "looks like they don't want
people to use it after all".

Later, at Sarnoff, ca. 1995, I tried again. That was about the time of the
"$350 for personal use, $200K (to start) for business use" fiasco.
Remember that? It's like saying "take a risk, throw away all your support
software, and oh by the way if it works you owe us a lot of money".
Brilliant.  Somehow, monopoly phone companies never really did get the
idea of marketing.

I have friends who were in ATT from ca. 1972 to the late 80s, and they
have told me there was a substantial contingent of clueless managers in
ATT who felt that releasing *Unix* to the outside world was a huge
mistake, and that while they lost the battle with Unix, they did not
intend to lose it with Plan 9. That would sure explain a lot.

The whole Plan 9 story (from the outside) looks like a long series of
attempts by ATT/Lucent to kill it. Think of ATT/Lucent as Wily Coyote and
Plan 9 as Roadrunner.

So there's a reason I started adding this stuff to legacy OSes.

I really think had ATT done the right thing in 1991, we'd all be using
Plan 9 now. I am convinced of that. As it is, they ran around suing
college students over the rights to 20-year-old files which were available
in the open literature. If anything convinced people to steer clear of
ATT-encumbered code, that was probably a big thing.

> It's very much like the New Testament parable about
> patching old wineskins...

In industry this type of retrofit (Plan 9 ideas to Linux) is usually
called "Operation Silk Purse".

> Really, Linux needs to be rewritten from the ground up,
> along with all them GNU tools.  Or we could all just use
> Plan 9...

No, it needs to be chucked. But as we all keep saying, "Installed Base".
You can't ignore that. If you put a really solid Linux emulation layer in
there (do you really want to support all 220 system calls?) you might have
a chance. Except it's so much slower in certain areas ... that's a
problem.

Did you want to take the job of porting Emacs to Plan 9?

ron