> It's not just the PHBs. I showed the original 9p (for 2.0.36) in 1998 > to a fair number of linux people, and back then I had private name > spaces, union mounts, user level servers, in fact just about all you > get in plan 9 today and STILL don't get in linux. > > They were strongly convinced there was no use for userland file > systems, or union mounts, or private name spaces, or any of this > stuff. They kept pointing to things that Linux did that were not at > all what I was showing them, saying "we already do that". At some > point I gave up. Years later, FUSE comes along, and ... well you know > the story.
It is always the same story. People like shiny baubles. Stuff they can relate to and/or show off to their friends. You just can't sell them on simplicity or flexibility. They don't care. If they did, they'd already be using plan9! If you want to sell them on 9P, build some shiny baubles they might want. Build a 9p client for iphone. Build a wireless 9p camera. Build something like openFrameworks.cc but simpler. People use it for all sorts of things including "spray painting" graffiti on skyscrapers -- see examples @ GraffitiResearchLab.com. Look at what Johny Lee has done with wiimote @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ People are making lots of new fun, creative uses of computers & IO devices. A simple building block framework can be very useful here and it will be a while before FUSE gets here!
