[9fans] Plan 9 professional engineers, tear up your NDAs!

[m***@sphericalharmony.com]

People are not free to do everything what they want. They need to
work, they have families and they have no free time at all. There used
to be a community of young free hackers around Plan 9 but
unfortunately it's not young or big enough.

I think there is a hidden, and incorrect assumption here. Underlying
this seems to be the idea that devoting time to Plan 9 will not return
real-world benefits to you to compensate you for the time spent.

I think this is untrue. I think that Plan 9 has immense practical
value in comparison to other computer systems, but that the community
seems to be writing off the usefulness of their own operating system.

For instance, a well-organized venti-based data backup system making
use of multiple ventis and progressive use of wrarena seems to me to
be the absolute best system for backing up data. Doing it with
appropriate replication means you need at least 2 ventis. To get the
most benefit out of venti, you want fossil and flfmt -v so we are
already at 4 functional nodes (not necessarily boxes), but once this
system is in place

I think there is a lot more to Plan 9 than just research, or just a
nice simple unix-traditions os, or just hobbyism. I think Plan 9 can
be a fire-breathing Data Dragon that gives you benefits you will
refuse to compute without, but the Plan 9 community - which so far as
I know, is pretty much just 9fans? - needs to put down their macbooks
and their p9p and get back into the true beautiful operating system,
and actually believe that it is a real os for using in a serious way and
working to receive the benefits from the full distributed architecture,
not just the simple unix-heritage core.

Ben Kidwell
"mycroftiv"

[v***@gmail.com]

Post by m***@sphericalharmony.com
and actually believe that it is a real os for using in a serious way and
working to receive the benefits from the full distributed architecture,
not just the simple unix-heritage core.

I wish I could. But there are very sophisticated tools out there that
are perfectly suited for their task. Form the other hand, Plan 9 has
perfect integration facilities but lacks ready to use applications.
So, there is a dilemma: would you use an already written application
or would you write it from scratch? In a time constrained environment
it's often the former. In the research projects it could be the
latter, but how much research we are doing at work?

[v***@gmail.com]

After thinking about it, I doubt that the developers of commercial
applications are that interested in integration with others at all.
Don't they get paid for imprisoning your data inside their
applications?