On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Anselm R. Garbe wrote:
On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 11:02:29PM -0400, Manny Calavera wrote:
"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough
improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix
creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done
well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious
system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an
existing codebase that is just good enough."
I think Plan 9 hasn't been a success because the Bell Labs made
it available under an Open Source license too late. If they'd
released it earlier there would have been chances of earlier
adaption in todays OS designs. A key to Unix' success was that
it has been available (in form of BSD and Linux) to students for
nearly the last two decades, which can't be said of Plan 9.
If Plan 9 would have been made production ready by Lucent or
like commercial Unices, it might have reached a market share
like HP-UX or something similiar today. But that wasn't the
case.
I don't believe it failed because Unix was just good enough.
Hell, why did OS X or Windows succeeded then? They are much worse
than Unix.
Though Plan 9 is not dead. Some people are at least still
interested in the OS. Even one of the professors at CMU,
that teaches their OS class. His reasoning is interesting,
at least:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~davide/p9.html
