Answering the second question: you won't want to use it in production, but if you have ever been intrigued by one of those Unix philosophy preaches, you should definitely take a look at it. It takes the tool philosophy (build simple tools that are easy to combine) and filesystem metaphor much further, besides addressing some (albeit not all) long-standing Unix WTFs.
Plan 9 is not the most elegant design of OSes, but its simple ways of combing primitives are pretty amazing. Simplicity is underappreciated nowadays.
Would you mind saying why? It isn't unstable or anything, just unfamiliar, in that you can't write C programs on it. But people do use it in production.
Well, it's always safer to use widely used solutions in production. That way you encounter fewer bugs, and it's much easier to find a workaround in case you do encounter one.
It's slow and doesn't run any software people usually want to run in production. If your "production" needs are something Plan 9 is actually tailored to, sure, go ahead.
I run it as my primary development environment, but what I do is pretty specific, 99.9% people need something else out of their development systems.
plan 9 is the earlier effort of re-engineering Unix and runs on hardware. It was meant to replace Unix, but it never did.
With inferno they went the VM route (the dis VM) and built it so that it runs on myriad platforms, from Unix and ActiveX. It still runs on hardware though. The intension was that you can run a network of hosted and native inferno installations, making it easier to adopt. Unfortunately, inferno saw no widespread adoption either.
The underlying filesystem concept is basically the same (the latest version of 9p and Styx are identical), but the programming environment changed a lot (you write limbo to run on dis). Also the user space programs were rewritten and get overhauled a bit. The community never get divergent enough though; inferno people tend to identify themselves as part of the plan 9 community.
Most likely, because at the beginning the Android team got a few well known Sun/JVM expatriates on their architecture team, like Chet Haase and Romain Guy among others.
Does anyone from Plan 9/Inferno work on the Android team at all?
Most of the team? I only know that Rob Pike and Russ Cox are Google employers. And I have the impression that they are working mostly on Golang and some distributed infrastructures. Did they employ any other inferno developers?
Well, Rob Pike created Go based on Limbo. This language becomes more and more popular. It is not in Android, but Google actively use it (probably in Google Play too).
Plan 9 is not the most elegant design of OSes, but its simple ways of combing primitives are pretty amazing. Simplicity is underappreciated nowadays.