30 Jan
2023
30 Jan
'23
11:05 p.m.
This wish is perhaps shared by no one else but I'd still love to have a system where
the kernel has the clean
architectural lines of plan9 + more good stuff from it, and a Unixy API for many existing
programs, perhaps as a shared lib. And I don't want all the heft of BSD or Linux
kernels!
Now this may be quite impractical (like trying to make C as safe as Rust) but that is what
I want! I just think there is a lot more here that can be explored further.
On Jan 30, 2023, at 2:15 PM, Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There was Plan 9 source available, but the early releases were in the AT&T Unix mode
and required some payment or academic connection. The early demo disks might not have had
source - I don't remember - but if not, there was simply no room on a floppy. The CD
releases had full source.
Plan 9 was a research system. It was hoped that maybe one day it would become a
commercial success, but that was never the prime motivation. It only "failed" as
a product, and there are many contributing factors there, including existing systems that
were good enough, a desire for people to have "workstations" and ignore the
benefits of a completing window UI on a mainframe (Cray was an exception, earlier), and
AT&T lawyers refusing to think realistically about open source (about as polite a way
I can express a multiyear fight that never ended, only fizzled into stalemate).
As a research system, Plan 9 was a huge success. We're still talking about its ideas
30+ years on.
-rob
On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 8:24 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 02:03:32PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:18 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
It's certainly not just job control. I think it's a combo of being
unfamiliar, no source (at first I believe) and Linux was already
pretty far along.
The lesson is that if there is an installed base, and you want people
to move, you have to make that easy and there has to be a noticeable
gain. Plan 9 sounded cool to me but Linux was easy.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:09:03AM -0500, Dan
Cross wrote:
Oh, I don't know. I think it's actually kind of important to see _why_
people didn't want to look deeper into plan9 (for example). The system
had a lot to offer, but you had to dig a bit to get into it; a lot of
folks never got that far. If it was really lack of job control, then
that's a shame. On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:45 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > Plan 9 was different, and a lot of people who were familiar with Unix
> > didn't like that, and were not interested in trying out a different
> > way if it meant that they couldn't bring their existing mental models
> > and workflows into the new environment unchanged.
> >
> > At one point it struck me that Plan 9 didn't succeed as a widespread
> > replacement for Unix/Linux because it was bad or incapable, but
> > rather, because people wanted Linux, and not plan9.
>
> Many people make that mistake. New stuff instead of extend old stuff.
Some would argue that's not a mistake. How else do we innovate if
we're just incrementally polishing what's come before?
I didn't say limit yourself to polishing, I said try and not invalidate
people's knowledge while innovating.
Too many people go down the path of doing things very differently and
they rationalize that they have to do it that way to innovate. That's
fine but it means it is going to be harder to get people to try your
new stuff.
The point I'm trying to make is that "different" is a higher barrier,
much, much higher, than "extend". People frequently ignore that and
that means other people ignore their work.
It is what it is, I doubt I'll convice anyone so I'll drop it.