Thanks for your insights. I agree that from the point of view of a developer writing complex applications simply, Plan 9 is on the right path. What I read of

Thanks for your insights. I agree that from the point of view of a developer writing complex applications simply, Plan 9 is on the right path. What I read of the cleaner operating system interface is what attracted me to Plan 9 at the start. I think a lot of the "new" things in programming are also attempts to fill that same need, of a cleaner, simpler interface to the underlying computer. All the "frameworks" out there, Android even, are attempting to clear that tangle of OS interface that has grown up underneath the applications. However, to have any of the nice design and brain-work come to real usefulness, Plan 9 has to actually address the grundgy parts of the problem. The hardware support must be there -- not for all hardware out there, but you have to get the items that have huge market share and are cheap. The user interface needs to be improved of course, and I think the community is actually pretty active and helpful for it's size -- if other issues were attacked, that would take care of itself. Thinking over how Plan 9 failed, I am reminded of rms's assertion that there is a GNU operating system, and that there was so much work to do GNU ended up writing everything else except the kernel, and thus GNU is most often used with the Linux kernel from somewhere else. Plan 9 is kind of what an operating system that just has a kernel looks like. They need to copy large parts of GNU as quickly as possible. I realized what acme was, but I never even attempted any spell-checking or fancy features. I may not have tried hard enough, but I had problems simple placing the cursor where I expected, and simple stuff like that. I never gave it hours uninterrupted learning and experimentation, which is what I did when I decided to become as good at vi as I am with emacs; given the whole Plan 9 system seemed dead, it didn't seem worth it. If I had infinite money and were dictator of the world and etc, here is what I would do to make Plan 9 happen: -- Make sure that the cheapest Dell laptop had complete hardware support. Note that this is something that Linux often fails at, and even Windows has problems in this area. -- Re-license it under the GPL (maybe BSD) licenses. If that is not allowed under the current license, it is conceivable that a small number of smart people could re-write it in a year, using the Lucent as a template, and possibly improving certain areas as they went. Even if they tossed the hard features, once a self-hosting, working, useable system was available under the GPL, a larger community could re-address the problem areas.