I would not say this is a fair interpretation of events. At Sun, the effort to merge BSD and System V was called the "lulu" project and the end result was Syst

I would not say this is a fair interpretation of events. At Sun, the effort to merge BSD and System V was called the "lulu" project and the end result was System V release 4 from AT&T and Solaris 2 from Sun. I was part of that effort and responsible for the transport independent RPC piece amongst others. The Spring project was, in my opinion, an aspirational project to re-imagine UNIX according to Mike Powell and others at Sun, as opposed to Plan 9 which was re-imagining UNIX according to Rob Pike and others at the Computer Science Research Center (CSRC) of Bell Labs. There were interesting rivalries in AT&T about who "owned" UNIX. On one side was the staff at CSRC who had invented it, and on the other side was Murray Hill which had commercialized it. For nearly identical reasoning, AT&T would not let the CSRC folks call their new OS UNIX, and Sun would not let the Spring folks call their new OS SunOS. Both groups had, at their core, some of the original architects of the OS that their respective company had become known for.