On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 01:43:49PM -0400, Wes Kussmaul wrote: > > On 8/29/20 1:25 PM, Leonardo wrote: > > I really don't understand why Plan 9 has not been adopted. Legacy base? > > By giving a lot of control to the user Plan 9 and its derivatives > undermine the Silicon Valley business model, which is built upon > breaking into your information home, taking your personal intellectual > property, and putting it on their balance sheets as a money making > asset. In other words, burglary and theft.
I'm with you on the topic of the ethical void rampant in a lot of SV tech companies, but this take is off the mark. SV businesses trade on convenience; it's only late-stage multinationals that attempt to leverage monopoly to remove user control. Fortunately by that stage they're poorly enough run that internal competition leads to senescense and new challengers introduce choice again. It happened to Nokia, IBM, Microsoft, and it's currently happening to Google, but all of them got to that late stage by selling stuff people wanted, not alone by being jerks. The new model is to burn venture capital to get that market control, but the same principal applies: by the time you're big enough to exert sufficient force to exploit a monopoly, you're sufficiently large that internal competition prevents you from operating efficiently. I think AT&T's sense of entitlement regarding their IP, combined with the fact that Plan 9 was never presented as a consumer-facing product (it was a research platform) had more to do with any lack of uptake. In other words, had it proved popular, the vultures would have arrived and done the same things they do on most platforms. In this case, better roosts had appeared by the time Plan 9 became something the vultures considered to be worth exploiting. I am grateful to the people who put effort into letting us have the code regardless of whatever we might imagine their motivations are. I'm glad we have access and that the access we have lets us shoot for whatever targets align with our priorities. khm ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T46e6d1465ae13031-M416a49f5c46fa379064dc633 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
