The authors worry that the ideas in Plan 9 will be lost if more people don't take it up, but I wonder if that is true if many of the original authors are still

The authors worry that the ideas in Plan 9 will be lost if more people don't take it up, but I wonder if that is true if many of the original authors are still alive, creating software and teaching others? Only Dennis Ritchie has left us. The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis. [Wikipedia]