Re: [dwm] The StumpWM Experience

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
Received on Wed Oct 10 2007 - 16:05:43 UTC