[random778]

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html

"Introduction

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system..."

It does not seem that it was ever meant to compete with or replace commercialized operating systems. The direct output of research is not something you sell - but it does give the world better things which can be industrialized.

[kgwgk]

> It does not seem that it was ever meant to compete with or replace commercialized operating systems.

UNIX was also a research system. The following paragraph from the article would also by applicable:

"One of the major problems with Plan-9 was that AT&T and the people behind Unix, while they were incredible scientists and programmers, they were not used to create commercial software and AT&T has never been in the software business. (...) They used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances but they never created software to be sold to someone else and it never was major source of revenue (...). This just means that they never had a sense of what could have been needed into the outside world."

If anything, this problem was relatively less important for Plan 9 given that they already had some experience in creating research systems that would become mainstream.

Edit: By the way, saying that "AT&T used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances" seems a bit of an understatement. Quoting wikipedia: "Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the operating systems Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and the programming languages C, C++, and S. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories."

[random778]

I'm not sure that I follow your argument. Are you saying that because a similar research project was successfully commercialized Plan-9 should be judged akin?

Even if you accept that, UNIX was not developed to what it became by AT&T. Let arguments about how they managed licensing UNIX vs how Plan-9 was licenced commense!

[kgwgk]

I'm not trying to argue with what you said, but pointing at the weakness of the article's conclusions. As another commenter just wrote "How does the author explain the huge success of the original UNIX? It violates everything he says."

[protomyth]

The actual product ended up being Inferno, and that ran into the combined Java marketing campaign and Lucent's lack of ability to market anything to developers. Well, Lucent continued a tradition that flowed from AT&T's UNIX PC[1] and all their various weird marketing once they got free of the monopoly restrictions.

1) they did get the cover of Byte https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05

[jff]

By "the actual product" you mean "a completely different OS written on a virtual machine that happens to also run on Plan 9", then yes. Inferno has 9P, it has a lot of the same good stuff as Plan 9, but there's a pretty big gulf between the two and fluency in one does not translate to fluency in the other.