|
> 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." |
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!