[jacquesm]

Unfortunately for plan-9 the world has moved on. Plan 9 will (and already has) influence many follow-ons but it is now behind the times in some aspects and still ahead in others.

Vmware and other virtualization vendors as well as the various cluster computing solutions are capable of live process migration, checkpointing and a ton of other nice features that Plan-9 simply doesn't have because at the time it was to be an improvement on Unix and 'Beowulf' was still just the name of a character in a story, Amazon was a figment of Jeff Bezos' imagination and the Google guys were still playing with their Lego.

To really revive Plan-9 would imply diverting resource from a lot of projects that have progressed far beyond where Plan-9 has been stuck for well over a decade. So as much as I love the whole idea behind Plan-9 and the way they've made a better unix I fear that they will never be able to get the kind of push they need to gain parity. Pity, really.

Plan-9 could have been where Linux is now if they had caught the wind at the right time. Community is the single most important factor in whether or not a technology will succeed in the longer term or not. Linus Torvalds beat all of the incumbents by doing one simple thing: opening up the source right from day #1 when the barrier to entry was sufficiently low that he got buy-in from a lot of capable people.

[yellow_and_gray]

> Community is the single most important factor in whether or not a technology will succeed in the longer term or not.

I'm not so sure. I wouldn't make that statement about Java for example. Technologies that succeed in the longer term have some merit to them. If it was just about community, Lisp would have ceased to exist, and yet you typed your comment in a web app written in a Lisp.

Plan 9 is the Lisp of operating systems. Why does my gut say Plan9-as-a-service is an undervalued startup idea?

[jacquesm]

The community around Java is mindbogglingly large. That community was bought-and-paid for rather than grown organically but there are more ways than one to skin a cat.

The lisp eco-system is more like a collection of communities of very small (individuals?) sub-communities.

What technology underpins the web-app here has very little to do with the success of the community interacting here, though for sure there are many more lisp capable programmers here than on most other programmer hang-outs (lambda the ultimate excepted).

[wtbob]

I don't know; I think that there's still space in the world for Plan 9 to compete. The fundamental ideas are sound, and the OS itself could be quite high-performance and secure (I won't write that it is, because AFAIK there's never been a comprehensive audit).

With virtualisation, its hardware requirements are no longer a dealbreaker.

With the rise of Go, I've been wondering if perhaps deep within Google there's a quiet use of Plan 9.