From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ronald G Minnich To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Private Namespaces for Linux In-Reply-To: <20011126053137.293C4199B5@mail.cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 07:18:54 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 294464ec-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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 Plan 9 into old, outdated systems, rather than comprehending the 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