"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."
- Eric S. Raymond
It's worth noting that Plan 9/Inferno are cited pretty regularly in computer science papers and a number of the ideas of P9 have been absorbed by Linux, such as representing 'everything' with the filesystem. Last I checked, the 2.6.x kernels also support the P9 protocol.
"...for the last 8 years" Yeah, well, Plan 9 hasn't had an official release since 2002.
Ya, I had never heard of Plan 9 until I started doing graduate work, and then one in ten papers somehow referenced plan 9, and almost every single operating system paper references it some how.
How true, IE6 used to have a large market share( may be still has considerable market share ) only because for all of its short comings, it gets the work done.
- Eric S. Raymond
It's worth noting that Plan 9/Inferno are cited pretty regularly in computer science papers and a number of the ideas of P9 have been absorbed by Linux, such as representing 'everything' with the filesystem. Last I checked, the 2.6.x kernels also support the P9 protocol.
"...for the last 8 years" Yeah, well, Plan 9 hasn't had an official release since 2002.