[glangdale]

My criticism of Plan 9 as dead is realism, not intellectual incuriosity. Speaking of intellectual incuriosity, I find it astonishing that people are still poking the corpse in an effort to turn it into a daily driver, rather than discussing the insights that made P9 fresh at the time or attempting to discover and apply similar insights today.

Also intellectually incurious: assuming that P9 expired due to POSIX eating its lunch. My personal take on it is that P9 expired partly due to bad licensing decisions but mainly due to a preposterously shitty attitude to Other People's Code. I vividly remember people in the Unix room clustered around the one Windows machine there that could do radical stuff like "run games" and "run a browser". If just a bit more effort had been put into Howard Trickey's APE Plan 9 might well have kept evolving and become useful, but NIH was more important. Or "Invented Here, But Not By The Right People" (C++).

POSIX could have been an asset to Plan 9 - a target to track instead of having to emulate a bunch of disparate Unixen.

[jpm9]

If you want POSIX you know where to find it.

[glangdale]

If P9 had been able to run a reasonable number of computer programs not written by people at the Labs, it might have survived or at least been more influential beyond "UTF-8, some odd remnant uses of 9P, and /dev/proc". The gratuitous incompatibility assured that the other interesting ideas were buried.

[jpm9]

Plan 9 has had a very active development community during the past decade, nothing is preventing people from coming up with interesting ideas and patches, even to APE if that floats one's boat. Mixing different contrasting cultures usually just doesn't work, if you want POSIX, use a POSIX system, if you want Plan 9, go native, i.e. how the system was intended to be used.