9fans archive / 1997 / 04 / 82 /    prev next

From: Brandon Black photon@nol.net
Subject: The future of Plan9?
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 01:01:27 -0500 (CDT)


<just pretend I quoted the whole thing>

I have an almost clear definition in my mind of what _I_ wish would come
of Plan 9/Brazil.  Unix is entrenched in the business world, and Unix will
probably not go away for a very long time.  I am a unix person, so please
don't take my bashing wrong.....  Unix has fallen over the years... most
of the commercial vendors (Sun, SGI, IBM, DEC, ....) have concentrated on
GUI's, Systems Admin tools, and hardware speedups in recent versions.  The
commercial unix world has very miserably failed to put forth new operating
system concepts, like those introduced by Plan 9.  Now, Brazil would never
get any market share as a *nix replacement, because it is not compatible
enough or supported enough (I can see commercial buyers saying: Where's
C++?  Where's the normal *nix include files?  There's no Sybase or Oracle
server for this? etc.....).... 

However, The concepts learned from Brazil could be deployed into current
*nix systems.  Lucent could license out the Brazil source code for
incorporation into the commercial *nix's.... or could incorporate it into
Reasearch Unix... or add some plan9-ish-ness to the successor of the
SysVR4 definition..... or some combination thereof...

I can only imagine what it would feel like to bind namespaces under
Solaris, or to use remote CPU resources to compile software without
leaving my local environment on an SGI.... 

my $.02

Brandon