[9fans] why work on plan 9 (was german kbmap)

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

> Why we work for Plan 9?   We cannot get money from it.

Speaking only for myself,

I use Plan 9 because it's a good collection of tools for a lot
of the jobs I do.  I work on Plan 9 when I think it is worth
my time to make some tool even better for something I'm
doing, or to add a new tool.  A lot of the time those tools
are general enough and simple enough to have many uses,
so the work has the added benefit of making Plan 9 better
for jobs others do.

Most of the work in the past few years has been
concentrated on fixing existing tools.  For me, it's worth 
spending some fraction of my time maintaining my tool box
as long as that tool box continues to provide benefits that I
couldn't get for less work elsewhere.

I have other reasons for working on Plan 9 (the sheer fun
certainly hooked me before I started using it for real work),
but the usefulness is what justifies my long-term interest.

I think this is true for many people on this list.  It's quite
nice to see the variety of people who submit bug fixes to
sources or email me fixes for the plan9ports tree.

As long as Plan 9 remains useful to people, I believe they
will keep working on it.

Russ