4 ms·

Sure they can. So what? The "real" Plan 9 continues to be developed and distributed by the labs as LPL. I don't know if the Berkley guys just got a bag of GPL

by 4ad 13y ago

Sure they can. So what? The "real" Plan 9 continues to be developed and distributed by the labs as LPL. I don't know if the Berkley guys just got a bag of GPL code or if this is a continuous agreement, and they'll get subsequent, more recent code in the future. In the meantime, code from Bell Labs is LPL.

_delirium 13y ago
> The "real" Plan 9 continues to be developed and distributed by the labs Are there still employees on the project? I had been under the impression that the entire core dev team left in 2003, mostly for Google, and that Alcatel-Lucent no longer staffs the project. Looking through the last-modified dates in the source tree, there are a handful of edits in the last few years, but not very many, and the only specific people I can find who've worked on plan9 in the past 5 years are all external to Bell Labs (e.g. the 9front people).
- 4ad 13y ago
  There's definitely more activity outside the labs than inside, however there are still a few Bell Labs people who work on it. For example, the new MIPS kernel was entirely labs work.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    MIPS? Who's using MIPS these days? Retrogeeks excepted, of course.
    - 4ad 13y ago
      Most routers are MIPS. There are probably more MIPS devices coming out each year than ARM devices, it's just that they are in very small devices and now in fancy phones.
      - vidarh 13y ago
        Last I saw, the estimated number of units shipped for ARM was around 3 billion, with MIPS and PPC at around 500 million, and x86 somewhere in the 300m-400m range. EDIT: These are per year for all of them.
        4ad 13y ago
        You might be right, I might be wrong. We'll never know. I tried to find good numbers, but estimates seem to be made up; e.g. between 1 and 10 billion ARM CPUs each year. I couldn't find good data. Either way, even if MIPS doesn't dominate anymore, it's still a huge market (probably more chips than x86), and will continue to be in the future (even though it might be shrinking).
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Networking equipment, various set-top boxes (the WDTV Live is a good example, running on a tri-core Sigma MIPS CPU; two cores are user accessible, the third is locked down to run DRM crap), some Android devices. Bunch of other embedded uses. As I noted elsewhere, at least as of a year or two ago MIPS was likely still outselling x86 in terms of volume (but x86 is still supreme in terms of revenue because all the other architectures have far lower average unit costs). They're having a hard time keeping up, though.
      - rbanffy 13y ago
        Yes, but what use would be a Plan 9 kernel for them? Is anyone actually using Plan 9 on a commercial product?
        4ad 13y ago
        What is the point of anything? What is the point of life. There is no point, the point is that people have fun working on things they tickle their intellect. People are motivated by things that are hard, beautiful. People are motivated by things that haven't been done before. People are not motivated by the usefulness of a thing. Plan 9 is a research operating system, it's a platform to do fundamental operating system research. It is not a product, and its development is not shaped by commercial interest. That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9.
        rbanffy 13y ago
        > Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9. Wow! That's insanely cool!
        jff 13y ago
        > That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. Some of it. Some of it runs Solaris. http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage
        13y ago

by 4ad 13y ago

_delirium 13y ago

> The "real" Plan 9 continues to be developed and distributed by the labs Are there still employees on the project? I had been under the impression that the entire core dev team left in 2003, mostly for Google, and that Alcatel-Lucent no longer staffs the project. Looking through the last-modified dates in the source tree, there are a handful of edits in the last few years, but not very many, and the only specific people I can find who've worked on plan9 in the past 5 years are all external to Bell Labs (e.g. the 9front people).

4ad 13y ago
There's definitely more activity outside the labs than inside, however there are still a few Bell Labs people who work on it. For example, the new MIPS kernel was entirely labs work.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  MIPS? Who's using MIPS these days? Retrogeeks excepted, of course.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    Most routers are MIPS. There are probably more MIPS devices coming out each year than ARM devices, it's just that they are in very small devices and now in fancy phones.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Last I saw, the estimated number of units shipped for ARM was around 3 billion, with MIPS and PPC at around 500 million, and x86 somewhere in the 300m-400m range. EDIT: These are per year for all of them.
      - 4ad 13y ago
        You might be right, I might be wrong. We'll never know. I tried to find good numbers, but estimates seem to be made up; e.g. between 1 and 10 billion ARM CPUs each year. I couldn't find good data. Either way, even if MIPS doesn't dominate anymore, it's still a huge market (probably more chips than x86), and will continue to be in the future (even though it might be shrinking).
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Networking equipment, various set-top boxes (the WDTV Live is a good example, running on a tri-core Sigma MIPS CPU; two cores are user accessible, the third is locked down to run DRM crap), some Android devices. Bunch of other embedded uses. As I noted elsewhere, at least as of a year or two ago MIPS was likely still outselling x86 in terms of volume (but x86 is still supreme in terms of revenue because all the other architectures have far lower average unit costs). They're having a hard time keeping up, though.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      Yes, but what use would be a Plan 9 kernel for them? Is anyone actually using Plan 9 on a commercial product?
      - 4ad 13y ago
        What is the point of anything? What is the point of life. There is no point, the point is that people have fun working on things they tickle their intellect. People are motivated by things that are hard, beautiful. People are motivated by things that haven't been done before. People are not motivated by the usefulness of a thing. Plan 9 is a research operating system, it's a platform to do fundamental operating system research. It is not a product, and its development is not shaped by commercial interest. That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9.
        rbanffy 13y ago
        > Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. They also make all their development on Plan 9. Wow! That's insanely cool!
        jff 13y ago
        > That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it. Some of it. Some of it runs Solaris. http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage
      - 13y ago