[teddyh]

> The reasons it died are likely:

The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box.

(As I have written many times in the past: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937087>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43641480>)

[EdiX]

Version 1 was never licensed to anyone. Version 2 was only licensed to universities for an undiscolsed price. Version 3 was sold as a book, I think this is the version you are referring to. However note that this version contained a license that only allowed non commercial uses of the source code. It also came with no support, no community and no planned updates (the project was shelved half a year later in favor of inferno)

More than the price tag the problem is that plan 9 wasn't really released until 2004.

[Shugyousha]

Strictly speaking, it's not dead. The code is now open source and all the rights are with the Plan 9 foundation: https://p9f.org/

It's just unlikely that it will get as big of a following as Linux has.

[pjmlp]

Had UNIX also been something like other OSes price points, instead of a song as you say, it would never even taken off, it was more about the openess and being crazy cheap than the alternatives, than anything else.