Dave Lukes wrote: > Given a wonderful OS used by 10 people or a crap OS used by > 10E6 people, I'll take the former.
The problem with that is that, except perhaps for research purposes, an OS is not an end in itself, but rather a platform supporting applications, which are what actually satisfy human needs. As time goes on, the popular platforms acquire a large number of apps that become ever more essential (PDF reader or MPG viewer, for example). If the OS developer population is below some critical mass, it can't keep up with such user requirements and eventually the platform becomes in effect unusable for what have become everyday needs. (There are similar problems in keeping up with device driver support for new hardware.) Linux seems to have reached the critical threshold, so it is "alive and well"; Plan9 seems to be well below that threshold, and has become largely irrelevant, except perhaps as a testing ground for ideas that may get adopted into more popular platforms.
