[9fans] Plan 9 Usenix BOF, 12 June 2003

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

It was a smaller BOF than some, but lively.  Other 9fans in attendance
included Dave Presotto of Bell Labs, Ron Minnich and Andrey
Mirtchovski of Los Alamos National Laboratories, Dan Cross, Eric Van
Hensbergen, now of IBM Austin Research, and Tom Glinos of the
University of Toronto.  Also in attendance was Andrew Hume of AT&T
Research.  There were others, many of whom I didn't recognise by
sight, probably 30 or so in total.  Though much anticipated, no one
from Hanger 18 attended (or at least they didn't identify themselves).
No guns nor Harleys were in evidence.

The licence has been changed and I don't really understand the
implications, except that the Open Source Institute blessed the
penultimate version and declared it officially ``open source''.  See
plan9.bell-labs.com/hidden/nntemplate.html.  It might be worth
pointing the OpenBSD folks at this licence if they are serious about
using the Plan 9 C compilers.

The LANL folks demonstrated their little diskless 4-machine cluster
using Linuxbios and running Plan 9.

Dave Presotto announced that pxeload is working and that he will push
ipv6config and more power pc ports out to sources.  IPSEC is not
happening, but he'd like to add process migration.  Russ Cox is
preparing a new distribution (5e?).

Rob Pike had a fairly serious bicycle accident 2 - 3 weeks ago and I'm
sure we all wish him well.  He has been back at work at Google
part-time.

I can't recall much else, but the BOF ran for two hours and a good
time was had by most, if not all.  Many people adjourned to the hotel
bar (or just outside it, as Texas and San Antonio apparently have no
non-smoking laws).