We talked at length about this issue at IWP9 without a lot of consensus. However, I think that many of us agreed on these points:
- writing drivers sucks. - copying Linux and Windows will accomplish very little. - one significant place where Plan 9 wins is using it as a versatile base for building pieces that people use without knowing it's Plan 9 (e.g., Sape's wireless base stations, Rangboom, xcpu, and many Inferno apps that Charles can't talk about). - there may be real value in finding a way to use Xen or other virtualization technologies to run Plan 9 on machines (for example, terminals) where you care more about the convenience of having Plan 9 than about the performance (or reliability!) of having it in control of the hardware. And perhaps most important of all: - remember to keep it fun! I can't deny the utility of having Firefox (I'm writing this in a Firefox window), but even if Plan 9 could run Firefox, the next thing would be oh but it needs to be able to run these ten plugins, and so on and so on. Personally, I think you are going to be much happier running Plan 9 in some VM environment on Linux or Windows than putting in the effort for the other way around. Russ
