Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave)
> no longer use Plan9 ?
> Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
> And do you still use venti ?

Operating systems and programming languages have
strong network effects: it helps to use the same system
that everyone around you is using.  In my group at MIT,
that meant FreeBSD and C++.  I ran Plan 9 for the first
few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of
a shared system made it too hard to collaborate.
When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries
and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience.

I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that
takes care of backups for my old group at MIT.  It uses
the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD.
The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation.
It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed
my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly.  But before
I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using
FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date.

If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep
using Plan 9.  But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf
software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux)
and to have good hardware support done by other people
(I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better,
when I open it again, it wakes up!).  Being able to get those
things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by
running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one
that works well for me.

Russ