Plan 9 is an open source project; as such, you get at least the same baseline "guarantees" about its longevity as every open source project enjoys: as long as someone's interested, work can continue.
there are still Bell Labs staff who work on Plan 9, although i don't believe they're working on it for its own sake (at least not officially). i don't believe ALU has made any sort of corporate commitment to the OS, that's true. the "longevity" of any open source OS is based on the community surrounding it; this is as true for Plan 9 as it is for Linux and most of the BSDs (and various other things). our community is way smaller than those, but my sense is we're stronger in many ways than we've been for most of the OS's life (we've got less Bell Labs involvement than we did for the first half, but a broader range of contributors). Plan 9 ships in at least one commercial product, which wasn't true for most of its life (i can only think of those 2e-based video systems from earlier; anyone else?), and is used in some really large research projects by people outside the Labs. i, at least, would be interested to know more about what the specific concerns are. that is, is it about availability, future evolution, commercial support, or something else? anthony
