Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 17 Jun 1999 16:45:39 -0500 | From | Brandon Black <> | Subject | Re: Plan-9 is definitely NOT a failure ... |
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Late slow reply to the Plan9/failure thread here... unlike perhaps several of the people who commented in this thread, I actually at one time had a fully functional 5 node multi-platform Plan 9 network running at home. From a technical perspective as an OS, Plan 9 was a serious success.... Plan 9 is _old_ now... and still, I see so many great things in it that commercial (and free) OS's have yet to match.
However... back to the "failure" thing... everyone kept commenting on how it wasn't a commercial success.... I'm under the impression that I read in the Plan 9 docs that it was always intended as a Research OS... specifically, even though it succeeded in coming up with cool new OS ideas, they weren't even researching new OS concepts, they were researching how to design an OS (in other words, Plan 9 was a project designed to research the art of designing a new OS). I can't think of where to get a quote on this.. but think one of the public Plan 9 docs said something to this effect..... so I don't think commercial success was ever a criteria for Plan 9.
In any case.. there were two spinoffs of Plan 9 that I'm aware of: Inferno is the attempt at a commercial spinoff... Inferno shares some kernel code with Plan 9, and some concepts (namespacing comes to mind)... It doesn't appear that Inferno is on track for commercial success, but maybe it is still coming.. or maybe I just don't keep up with it well enough anymore. The other spinoff was Brazil... it was a spinoff of the Plan 9 codebase, along the same lines (i.e. a super-unix) but it was supposed to be a secret project that the public never got to touch... god only knows what happened to it....
(plz cc my email.. I'm not subscribed)
Brandon
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