It's worth looking at Rob Pike's (one of the Plan 9 inventors) paper, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant": http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://h

It's worth looking at Rob Pike's (one of the Plan 9 inventors) paper, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant": http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf My own view is that Linux is Good Enough for most people. And that "good enough" beats "better", at least for most values of "better". This is an admission that "path dependence" matters for the operating system market, and that network effects can cause the appearance of market failure.