[9fans] Re: Future of Plan9

[Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Fco.J.Ballesteros wrote:

> We have gone through this before.

And we ain't done yet, by a long shot.

> I'm using it for my real world work, as others do.

BFD, that is -not- the measure of success in Open Source. User base is
(just as in real world commercial software).

> Could we stop discussing philosophy and get back to system
> issues?

You draw a specious distinction. One can't exist without the other. If you
don't want to participate in the discussion then don't (I believe Plan 9
has a 'd' key like most other OS'es). Stay stuck in the compiler telling
yourself the same old same old, that's your choice. Nobody makes you reply
to my submissions to this list other than your own bruised ego.

The reality is that the Plan 9 community, as I've said before, is inbread
and really not effective at developing a -thriving- user community. You
can write all the nifty code you want, if nobody uses it you've wasted
your effort. A user community equals success, period.

After being available for two(!!!) years some very important observations
can be made about the (in)viability of the Plan 9 developer community as
it stands now.

-	Not a single other user group exists (it's ok, Hangar 18 has
	folks in several cities around the US). -NO- other efforts
	are extant outside of Hangar 18.

	After two(!!!) years that's an embarassing statement to make,
	even for me. It didn't take but a little over a year from the
	first time Linus released Linux until the first user groups
	started. I have a hard time explaining in a rational, reasonable
	way to people who have a interest in using Plan 9 why this is. It
	in fact is one of the major turn-offs to get people to even try it.
	People who are technically aware of the history of Unix and Plan 9
	generally walk away in shock.

-	There are no(!!!) introductory documents for new users (don't
	worry, Hangar 18 is working on that now.

-	I've yet to see an actual article in -any- of the commercial or
	Open Source technical or user community literature (it's Ok,
	we're working on that too).

-	The boot process is still one of the most aggravating issues for
	any new Plan 9 user (we're working on that also).

-	The commercial outlet for Plan 9 has zero, nada, nil, null
	programs for fostering user communities. The best we've received
	to date is some snide comment by one of the reps about free
	t-shirts if somebody writes code. As if getting people to use that
	code isn't at least as important (especially if you want people
	to buy gobs of your product - 90% of all users are just that,
	users; not developers).

	I had hoped to address this issue by forming a LLC but the poor
	economy has dashed that because the other participants in the
	fledgling effort simply don't have the resources at this time
	so we're going to have to put that one off for the time being.

-	Plan 9 is a -distributed- OS, using it on your own personal
	desktop is like driving a Indy car around a Malibu Grand Prix
	track (no affiliation or insult intended to Malibu). Not a single
	resource exists outside of Hangar 18 to foster the growth and
	development of distributed resources for public access via Open
	Source efforts.

-	I've made two offers to public comment about Plan 9 events to
	 get users to appear at events where Plan 9 was supposedly to be
	'demonstrated'.

	That's a pitifull responce and in and of itself justifies heaps
	of abuse on the development community. The offer stands open to
	any individual or organization that is interested in promoting
	wider use of Plan 9, I will do whatever I can do help.

-	There is no effort outside of Hangar 18 to create a Open Source
	public access point into relevant resources. Instead we get an
	endless stream of "Try this site..." instead of a more reasoned,
	and rational Plan 9 approach of attaching those resources to a
	common name space and having them appear automagically to -all-
	users in tandem.

	What a joke, the Plan 9 developers don't even understand how to
	use their own creation effectively. Instead they use the same old
	same old, treating Plan 9 as if it were just another varient of
	*nix.

-	There are -no- efforts outside of Hangar 18 to foster the use
	of Plan 9 and wireless networking to really demonstrate the
	power of distributed computing (to quote Rheingold - what
	happens when that PDA in your hand is the front end to a
	tera-flop distributed computing resource?). If we follow the
	Plan 9 development community we'll never know. Plan 9 has the
	power to give us that -TODAY-.

What a sad list of failures of the Plan 9 development community. And it
would take such little effort to do something about each and every one of
them. Plan 9 has such promise and to think it will die because the people
who create it lack the vision to understand how to really use it. Of
course part of the problem is that many of the developers have never
really embraced the concept of Open Source and what that means to them
individually, let alone having any interest in distributed computing
outside of getting their name plastered on some source tree somewhere
that will be admired by some small closed community. Bruised ego indeed.

Sigh.

Hangar 18 may be slow and poor, but at least we act.


 --
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      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage@ssz.com                            jchoate@open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
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