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It should be noted that Plan 9 is far from dead or outdated. The 9front developers have continued to make many improvements to the OS while retaining backwards

It should be noted that Plan 9 is far from dead or outdated. The 9front developers have continued to make many improvements to the OS while retaining backwards compatibility. 9legacy offers a set of patches which try to stay closer to the original Bell Labs distribution. There are also other ongoing developments, such as my own Advanced Namespace Tools and a new grid of public 9p services.

carussell 9y ago
Is there a contingent of 9fans doing work on using Plan 9 for DevOps? The fact that doesn't have popular graphical software (or even the same conventions) wouldn't hold it back there. If it's really as well designed and coherent as the praise always makes it seem, it should be an attractive option on the server. So developers can stick with Windows/Mac/Linux on personal machines, and should be deploying to Plan 9 in the cloud, right?
- mycroftiv 9y ago
  It might make sense in theory, but in practice there are very very few Plan 9 users and developers. Fundamental design quality is never a guarantee of "success" as measured by size of the userbase. If you look at the culture of Plan 9 users, there is also often a somewhat adversarial perspective on standard software. It's a complicated topic, with a lot of weird history involving things like Plan 9 not having a decent open source license for a long time. Once the patterns were established, sociocultural issues outweighed any technical issues. You can imagine an alternate history where things all worked out differently, but at present, Plan 9 is hard to view as a realistic option for any kind of mainstream corporate software work. A lot of us think that is probably more of a good thing than a bad thing, economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned.
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    If not for economic impact, why do you work on Plan 9? Do you view it as a research project? A hobby?
    - arghwhat 9y ago
      Some people use it seriously for their home/work computers, and work on it solely for that purpose. Others do it out of interest. It's a very, very nice OS to experiment on due to the simplicity of everything. The kernel is almost small enough to memorize.
    - mycroftiv 9y ago
      I guess you could call it a hobby as much as anything. It feels more serious than that to me, based on the amount of time and effort I put into it. In addition to developing os-level projects for Plan 9 itself, I write interactive fiction games, which feels to me like a serious artistic pursuit, but most people would put interactive fiction text adventures in the "hobby" category. My brain doesn't really follow the dichotomy of using whether or not something is profit-making for how "important" it is. I understand that is an attitude that is somewhat a measure of personal privilege to not focus that hard on economic issues.
      - sahil-kang 9y ago
        Would you mind sharing a few good intro sources for Plan 9? I’m a small-time Linux contributor, but haven’t delved into any other operating systems. Interactive fiction games are always appreciated too :)
        henesy 9y ago
        The paper this thread links to is great for this. Sites of interest: * http://cat-v.org http://cat-v.org * http://9front.org http://9front.org * http://9legacy.org http://9legacy.org * http://9p.io http://9p.io We also have a Discord server I linked in another comment.
        marttt 9y ago
        HN discussion of a 'What makes Plan 9 unique?' discussion in the 9fans mailing list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882797 For another short overview, there's also Eric S. Raymond's take on Plan 9 in "The Art of Unix Programming": http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
  - rectang 9y ago
    > ...economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned. I'm reminded of this note from the README for 3Blue1Brown's `manim`, an animation library for his own use (and thus decidedly not a community project): "But the tricky part about anything which confers the benefit of originality is that this benefit cannot be easily shared." Just because a project has an open source license doesn't mean that it has, or should have, open governance.
    - nitemice 9y ago
      This also raises an interesting point that I hadn't properly considered before: an open-source project doesn't have to be universally applicable to be useful. Anyone that's ever built an open-source demo or example project has potentially contributed to someone else a lot, even if they can't directly use that project or have to make modifications to apply it to their situation. If more people were willing to open up seemingly niche projects like this, it would surely help countless others.
- kakarot 9y ago
  The Linux kernel is maintained by hundreds of contributers and Linus is quite cautious about regressions. Linux has a mature ecosystem and several flavors and components to choose from. Plan9, while leagues ahead the *nix design architecturally, has a much smaller ecosystem, no real choice in components, and virtually no enterprise support.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    > The Linux kernel is maintained by hundreds of contributers and Linus is quite cautious about regressions. I just wish similar caution was demonstrated from userspace component maintainers. > Linux has a mature ecosystem and several flavors and components to choose from. And certain high ranking userspace maintainers are chomping at the bit to pair the number of flavors and components right down, to ease their own workload.
vadimberman 9y ago
Is there any chance it'll go mainstream, in your opinion?
- mycroftiv 9y ago
  Almost no chance, because "mainstream" would require a huge amount of software to be written or ported for the operating system that does not currently exist. When it comes to things like multimedia and games and webbrowsers and standard office-suites that account for the vast majority of the average person's software use, Plan 9 is not an option. It is true that 9front has support for running virtual machines now, but I see little reason that the average person would ever choose to be running LibreOffice in a virtual machine inside Plan 9 as their standard way of working.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    Oh, is it a desktop-only OS? No embedded device / server capabilities? These two worked out for Linux...
    - mveety 9y ago
      No it's both a server and a desktop OS. The architecture semi-requires the ability to be both cooked in. In my usecase I have my terminals which are desktops that boot off of my main fileserver.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Its sucessor, Inferno, has been bougth by Vita Nuova and they target it at embedded devices. http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/
      - vadimberman 9y ago
        Very interesting, thanks. From the descriptions, the architecture looks kickass. Looks like an ultimate device driver toolkit.
henesy 9y ago
Seconding 9front and friends, they've really done a lot to broaden hardware support and improve the system overall.

carussell 9y ago

Is there a contingent of 9fans doing work on using Plan 9 for DevOps? The fact that doesn't have popular graphical software (or even the same conventions) wouldn't hold it back there. If it's really as well designed and coherent as the praise always makes it seem, it should be an attractive option on the server. So developers can stick with Windows/Mac/Linux on personal machines, and should be deploying to Plan 9 in the cloud, right?

mycroftiv 9y ago
It might make sense in theory, but in practice there are very very few Plan 9 users and developers. Fundamental design quality is never a guarantee of "success" as measured by size of the userbase. If you look at the culture of Plan 9 users, there is also often a somewhat adversarial perspective on standard software. It's a complicated topic, with a lot of weird history involving things like Plan 9 not having a decent open source license for a long time. Once the patterns were established, sociocultural issues outweighed any technical issues. You can imagine an alternate history where things all worked out differently, but at present, Plan 9 is hard to view as a realistic option for any kind of mainstream corporate software work. A lot of us think that is probably more of a good thing than a bad thing, economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  If not for economic impact, why do you work on Plan 9? Do you view it as a research project? A hobby?
  - arghwhat 9y ago
    Some people use it seriously for their home/work computers, and work on it solely for that purpose. Others do it out of interest. It's a very, very nice OS to experiment on due to the simplicity of everything. The kernel is almost small enough to memorize.
  - mycroftiv 9y ago
    I guess you could call it a hobby as much as anything. It feels more serious than that to me, based on the amount of time and effort I put into it. In addition to developing os-level projects for Plan 9 itself, I write interactive fiction games, which feels to me like a serious artistic pursuit, but most people would put interactive fiction text adventures in the "hobby" category. My brain doesn't really follow the dichotomy of using whether or not something is profit-making for how "important" it is. I understand that is an attitude that is somewhat a measure of personal privilege to not focus that hard on economic issues.
    - sahil-kang 9y ago
      Would you mind sharing a few good intro sources for Plan 9? I’m a small-time Linux contributor, but haven’t delved into any other operating systems. Interactive fiction games are always appreciated too :)
      - henesy 9y ago
        The paper this thread links to is great for this. Sites of interest: * http://cat-v.org http://cat-v.org * http://9front.org http://9front.org * http://9legacy.org http://9legacy.org * http://9p.io http://9p.io We also have a Discord server I linked in another comment.
      - marttt 9y ago
        HN discussion of a 'What makes Plan 9 unique?' discussion in the 9fans mailing list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882797 For another short overview, there's also Eric S. Raymond's take on Plan 9 in "The Art of Unix Programming": http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
- rectang 9y ago
  > ...economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned. I'm reminded of this note from the README for 3Blue1Brown's `manim`, an animation library for his own use (and thus decidedly not a community project): "But the tricky part about anything which confers the benefit of originality is that this benefit cannot be easily shared." Just because a project has an open source license doesn't mean that it has, or should have, open governance.
  - nitemice 9y ago
    This also raises an interesting point that I hadn't properly considered before: an open-source project doesn't have to be universally applicable to be useful. Anyone that's ever built an open-source demo or example project has potentially contributed to someone else a lot, even if they can't directly use that project or have to make modifications to apply it to their situation. If more people were willing to open up seemingly niche projects like this, it would surely help countless others.
kakarot 9y ago
The Linux kernel is maintained by hundreds of contributers and Linus is quite cautious about regressions. Linux has a mature ecosystem and several flavors and components to choose from. Plan9, while leagues ahead the *nix design architecturally, has a much smaller ecosystem, no real choice in components, and virtually no enterprise support.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > The Linux kernel is maintained by hundreds of contributers and Linus is quite cautious about regressions. I just wish similar caution was demonstrated from userspace component maintainers. > Linux has a mature ecosystem and several flavors and components to choose from. And certain high ranking userspace maintainers are chomping at the bit to pair the number of flavors and components right down, to ease their own workload.

vadimberman 9y ago

Is there any chance it'll go mainstream, in your opinion?

mycroftiv 9y ago
Almost no chance, because "mainstream" would require a huge amount of software to be written or ported for the operating system that does not currently exist. When it comes to things like multimedia and games and webbrowsers and standard office-suites that account for the vast majority of the average person's software use, Plan 9 is not an option. It is true that 9front has support for running virtual machines now, but I see little reason that the average person would ever choose to be running LibreOffice in a virtual machine inside Plan 9 as their standard way of working.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  Oh, is it a desktop-only OS? No embedded device / server capabilities? These two worked out for Linux...
  - mveety 9y ago
    No it's both a server and a desktop OS. The architecture semi-requires the ability to be both cooked in. In my usecase I have my terminals which are desktops that boot off of my main fileserver.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Its sucessor, Inferno, has been bougth by Vita Nuova and they target it at embedded devices. http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/
    - vadimberman 9y ago
      Very interesting, thanks. From the descriptions, the architecture looks kickass. Looks like an ultimate device driver toolkit.

henesy 9y ago

Seconding 9front and friends, they've really done a lot to broaden hardware support and improve the system overall.