This whole discussion has devolved into a political left vs. right like debate. Suffice it to say that without a critical mass of users, Bell Labs and/or Alcatel-Lucent will drop it, it will experience insufficient support from the user base at large, and it will suffer bit-rot until it won't boot anywhere anymore.
Here is an exercise for fun too. Create your own written language, and write a bunch of books in it. Have fun. Blake On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 2:17 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net>wrote: > > "major piece among many" can be more precisely stated as "many pieces > among > > many in order for the platform to achieve a critical mass of users". > > the metaphor "critical mass" is really tiresome one. it does not apply > to operating systems. if one person finds the os useful, then that's > enough. > > i'm not entirely clear how this metaphor is supposed to be interpreted, but > perhaps the idea is that with lots of users, lots of software gets written > and > clearly more is better. > > or maybe not. plan 9 is a research system. for me that means we use it as > it makes doing new and interesting things, or the same thing in an > interesting > way easy. so having piles of ported software is at best a distraction. > > - erik > >
