"Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions." It's taking a very long time. At the current ra

"Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions." It's taking a very long time. At the current rate of transfer, Linux will take the whole 21st century to absorb the progress Plan 9 made in the 1980s. What I hope will happen, is that Linux will focus on the traditional OS role of abstracting hardware, and become purely a hypervisor system. That would exploit its strengths: the vast collection of device drivers, and systems such as network packet munging and LVM. It would provide a sane, consistent hardware interface, that sane, consistent application interfaces such as Plan 9, Oberon, and Alan Kay's new system could easily support.