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While it is only a few : Sydney Olympics lighting system was Plan9 based. Inferno was used by NASA JPL projects Lucent use a real time version of plan9 in ph

While it is only a few : Sydney Olympics lighting system was Plan9 based. Inferno was used by NASA JPL projects Lucent use a real time version of plan9 in phone masts Coraid use Plan9 on their NAS servers Researchers at LANL and IBM use plan9 on the Blue Gene, and other, supercomputers I have worked for two plan9 based companies - ok they didn't survive but we tried :) The international plan9 conferences drew about 30 people. People from commercial enterprises used plan9 in their workflows. Plan9 was my desktop while building a successful recruitment website.

cplease 11y ago
Lonely comment is lonely. Literally halfs of dozens of research projects and ones of promotional installations served! Nearly threes of dozens attended conferences, at which twos of booths were no doubt tabled, perhaps both by you, one of the only persons who apparently used Plan 9 commercially. I'm feeling nostalgic enough to go launch an inferno instance now just on principle.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Plan9 was only ever an experiment, labelled as a Research OS. I would still say is was a successful experiment.
- gkya 11y ago
  It's unadopted, but this does not mean it is bad. GNU/Linux is the worst of all and survives only because it's widely adopted, and better-marketed. Many who turn to Unix world first encounter GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is, quality-wise, inferior to both Plan9 and BSDs, it's a big hack, but it came before, and got adopted first. Now I downvoted all your comments in this thread for they are unconstructive both in the negative and the positive directions. This is a fanboy-like attitude, where you ignore the fact I explained above, and attack other comments. You take quantity over quality. BSDs and other systems have their user bases. Those may be small, but they exist. Both GNU/Linux and BSDs are inferior to the ideal system where most legacy cruft shall be gone, but in order to reach that ideal system we should develop the research projects, the ones with little-to-no use. E.g. Plan9. Or microkernels. The all-utf8 approach is perfect, but it can't easily propagate to the mainline if it is not tested for long in research projects, and the ecosystem adapts in this timeframe. So we'd rather not attack them, but let them happen. They'll always be better than mainline, but lesser-adopted, but when they die, the good parts of them will propagate to GNU/Linux, BSD, etc. Take ZFS for example, it was developed on a Sun system, it's not widely adopted, but its now on FreeBSD and Linux (i.e. btrfs, the same concept), for you to enjoy. Or the research in functional languages. Many of those are not adopted, but many features are now propagating to mainline languages.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Linux came before BSD? Please become better informed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars#BSD_and_the_rise_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars#BSD_and_the_rise_of_... "BSD purged copyrighted AT&T code from 1989 to 1994. During this time various open-source BSD x86 derivatives took shape, starting with 386BSD, which was soon succeeded by FreeBSD and NetBSD." BSD was an OS long before 1989; the open-source BSD's weren't new projects written from scratch, but made possible by purging AT&T copyrighted code from the code base. Linux (the kernel) only started in 1991, from scratch. The GNU parts that go into a "GNU/Linux" --- the GNU C compiler and utilities from the GNU project --- started in 1984. But that is still later than BSD. 1BSD was released in 1978: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#1BSD_.28PDP-11.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution...]
    - gkya 11y ago
      Oh thanks. And who invented vi? Bram Moolenaar! Seriously, it should be obvious that BSDs mean, in the context of my comment, modern BSDs. The GNU/linux environment was practically usable before those were. Your comment is pure evil rhetoric.
cturner 11y ago
Hey, this isn't really a direct response to any of the points you made, but I've been thinking about your get-rid-of-the-tty comment, and wanted to ask. What is your take on syntax highlighting in a plan9 world? I've read a list of questions somewhere about p9, and remember this one being asked and having a typically abrasive response, along the lines of "just don't". And I often have a lot of time for those kind of arguments - embrace minimalism. But I regularly (daily) find syntax highlighting to be super-useful for highlighting small errors. What's your take? It seems like a regex-ey problem. Could it be done in a way that was within the spirit of such a system?

cplease 11y ago

Lonely comment is lonely. Literally halfs of dozens of research projects and ones of promotional installations served! Nearly threes of dozens attended conferences, at which twos of booths were no doubt tabled, perhaps both by you, one of the only persons who apparently used Plan 9 commercially. I'm feeling nostalgic enough to go launch an inferno instance now just on principle.

SixSigma 11y ago
Plan9 was only ever an experiment, labelled as a Research OS. I would still say is was a successful experiment.
gkya 11y ago
It's unadopted, but this does not mean it is bad. GNU/Linux is the worst of all and survives only because it's widely adopted, and better-marketed. Many who turn to Unix world first encounter GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is, quality-wise, inferior to both Plan9 and BSDs, it's a big hack, but it came before, and got adopted first. Now I downvoted all your comments in this thread for they are unconstructive both in the negative and the positive directions. This is a fanboy-like attitude, where you ignore the fact I explained above, and attack other comments. You take quantity over quality. BSDs and other systems have their user bases. Those may be small, but they exist. Both GNU/Linux and BSDs are inferior to the ideal system where most legacy cruft shall be gone, but in order to reach that ideal system we should develop the research projects, the ones with little-to-no use. E.g. Plan9. Or microkernels. The all-utf8 approach is perfect, but it can't easily propagate to the mainline if it is not tested for long in research projects, and the ecosystem adapts in this timeframe. So we'd rather not attack them, but let them happen. They'll always be better than mainline, but lesser-adopted, but when they die, the good parts of them will propagate to GNU/Linux, BSD, etc. Take ZFS for example, it was developed on a Sun system, it's not widely adopted, but its now on FreeBSD and Linux (i.e. btrfs, the same concept), for you to enjoy. Or the research in functional languages. Many of those are not adopted, but many features are now propagating to mainline languages.
- kazinator 11y ago
  Linux came before BSD? Please become better informed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars#BSD_and_the_rise_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars#BSD_and_the_rise_of_... "BSD purged copyrighted AT&T code from 1989 to 1994. During this time various open-source BSD x86 derivatives took shape, starting with 386BSD, which was soon succeeded by FreeBSD and NetBSD." BSD was an OS long before 1989; the open-source BSD's weren't new projects written from scratch, but made possible by purging AT&T copyrighted code from the code base. Linux (the kernel) only started in 1991, from scratch. The GNU parts that go into a "GNU/Linux" --- the GNU C compiler and utilities from the GNU project --- started in 1984. But that is still later than BSD. 1BSD was released in 1978: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#1BSD_.28PDP-11.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution...]
  - gkya 11y ago
    Oh thanks. And who invented vi? Bram Moolenaar! Seriously, it should be obvious that BSDs mean, in the context of my comment, modern BSDs. The GNU/linux environment was practically usable before those were. Your comment is pure evil rhetoric.

cturner 11y ago

Hey, this isn't really a direct response to any of the points you made, but I've been thinking about your get-rid-of-the-tty comment, and wanted to ask. What is your take on syntax highlighting in a plan9 world? I've read a list of questions somewhere about p9, and remember this one being asked and having a typically abrasive response, along the lines of "just don't". And I often have a lot of time for those kind of arguments - embrace minimalism. But I regularly (daily) find syntax highlighting to be super-useful for highlighting small errors. What's your take? It seems like a regex-ey problem. Could it be done in a way that was within the spirit of such a system?