i loved plan9. i was into it before the 3rd edition was released and i built a small career out of it. it was and still is the most enjoyable system to work with.
i'm happy it's getting its dues in retrospect and is now considered a cool thing, but i can't help but remember how just after the first open release everybody and their uncle kept complaining about trivia: "how can I become root?" "it doesn't do x11?" "its license isn't gnu-open?"
rob is probably right: licensing killed plan9, but so did everybody who couldn't see the forest for the trees. the linux juggernaut was too popular back then.
I'm not sure licensing was the only reason. A pitch that goes "we work like X, but better" is unconvincing. Especially when it ends with "in an incompatible way."
their motto if i recall was never that. they had two demos about being Unixier... one involved tar-ing a process in one machine, sending to another one (or mounting that machine cpu over the network, don't remember) untar-ing and the process continued from when it was first packaged with ui state and all.
That was Plan B. I've never used it, or read the papers or the manual, but everything was centralised on a single box. The reason the tar thing works at all is because all it contains is pointers to your centralised state. In case anyone is trying to wrap their heads around the above comment.
The closest Labs equivalent would be Protium, which is for writing programs like he mentioned with the sam/samterm split but with reattachability. Like all the most interesting application-level softwares for Plan 9, that actually do something for you, it wasn't released.
i'm happy it's getting its dues in retrospect and is now considered a cool thing, but i can't help but remember how just after the first open release everybody and their uncle kept complaining about trivia: "how can I become root?" "it doesn't do x11?" "its license isn't gnu-open?"
rob is probably right: licensing killed plan9, but so did everybody who couldn't see the forest for the trees. the linux juggernaut was too popular back then.