...Tell that to the people who are maintaining 9front and 9atom. Oh wait, you just did.
My personal opinion: Plan 9 in its forked form will continue to be used and worked for a long time. Hell, there are people still using Amigas for "serious" computing! I too many times thinking about bringing Plan 9 ideas to Linux or UNIX systems, with the conclusion that the design principals are just too different. You have parts of Plan 9 making it over to the other side, but Linux or BSD will never be a Plan 9-like operating system- forever UNIX. Regards, Lee On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Blake McBride <bl...@mcbride.name> wrote: > 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 >> >
