Have you ever gotten in-between a bunch of siblings fighting? They're all mad at each other until an outsider comes in and then suddenly there's a unified fron

Have you ever gotten in-between a bunch of siblings fighting? They're all mad at each other until an outsider comes in and then suddenly there's a unified front against the new guy. I blame the ultimate demise of commercial unix on infighting between HP, Sun, Cray, Digital, Tandem and everyone else who had a better idea of what UNIX should look like: i.e. how their UNIX was perfect in every way and safe to lock into because it addressed all your needs. I remember impassioned arguments about whether HP-UX or Solaris was the better server to host Sybase or Oracle because the developers of said products developed on one first and ported to another, or so it was said. When I tried to show Linux to my peers in the early 90's it was "Meh, proprietary hardware is better than PC hardware, why would we use that?" Eventually as we all know commercial Linux won the day over pretty much everything else. I also tried to show people Plan 9 and was again shot down by people who lacked vision, but this time they were right. The only thing it seems most UNIX family members agree on is Plan 9's the red-headed cousin every UNIX vendor hates. For me it had echoes of Apollo's open namespace concept on their OS. But as others have stated a) it didn't have any compelling reasons to adopt it over standard UNIX for an average business, b) it had a bunch of UI quirks that only a mother could love. I still think we have things to learn from Plan 9 if you take the open namespace concept and wrap it in a container. My company (a Fortune 50) is getting rid of laptops, privileged remote access (no root over VPN) and even desktops (most everyone's hosted on virtual desktops now.) Why not give me access to a desktop wrapped in an encrypted container? I boot their OS, it establishes contact with a server that verifies my boot-disk is uncorrupted and then downloads whatever I need to work inside the container, but once I'm done it's all destroyed until next time? I can operate inside my employer's namespace but once the access is gone there are no local traces? shrug Anyway back to Plan 9, it was good. It wasn't great enough to make anyone switch.