Why Plan-9?

[Karsten M. Self]

on Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 04:56:35PM -0700, Meyer Wolfsheim (wolf at priori.net) wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> 
> > Summer, June/July, IIRC.  I've done a couple of look-ups since.  There's
> > been little additional news or information (I'm not saying none, I'm
> > saying little).  OpenBSD, a relatively little-known free 'nix, gets
> > rather more press and community coverage.
> 
> Little-known? That's unfair. OpenBSD is a fairly well known operating
> system, among the members of its target audience.

I'll leave grasping the concept of "relative mindshare" as an exercise
to the reader.

I use and admin an oBSD box myself.

> > Poor licensing choices are one of several key modes of failure for free
> > software projects.  If Plan 9 precedes forward, I expect to see another
> > two or three significant licensing revisions.
> 
> Explain the popularity of Unix, then.

I think Unix is an exemplar of my points, for its heyday.  Again,
"relative" is a core concept.

I couldn't do much better than Kernighan and Pike in _The UNIX
Programming Environment_, Chapter 10, Epilog, written in 1984:

    The UNIX operating system is well over ten years old,  but the
    number of computers running it is growing faster than ever.  For a
    system designed with no marketing goals or even intentions, it has
    been singularly successful....

    The main reason for its commercial success is probably its
    portability -- the feature that everything but small parts of the
    the compilers and kernel runs unchanged on any computer....  But the
    UNIX system was popular long before it was of commercial
    significance...  The 1974 CACM paper by Ritchie and Thompson
    generated interest in the academic community....Through the
    mid-1970s UNIX knowledge spread by word of mouth:  although the
    system came unsupported and without guarantee, the people who used
    it were enthusiastic enough to convince others to try it too....

    Why did it become popular in the first place?  ...[I]t was designed
    and built by a small number (two) of exceptionally talented people,
    whose sole purpose was to create an environment that would be
    convenient for program development, and who had the freedom to
    pursue that ideal....

    In that early system were packed a number of inventive applications
    of computer science, including stream processing (pipes), regular
    expressions, language theory...and more specific instances like the
    algorithms in diff....

    The UNIX system has since become one of the computer market's
    standard operating system, and with market dominance has come
    responsibility and the need for "features" provided by competing
    systems.  As a result, the kernel has grown in size by a factor of
    10 in the past decade....

    [A]lthough UNIX has begun to show some signs of middle age, it's
    still viable and still gaining in popularity.  And that popularity
    can be traced to the clear thinking of a few people in
    1969....  Although they didn't expect their system to spread to tens
    of thousands of computers, a generation of programmers is glad that
    it did.

This reads very much like a history of GNU/Linux, a similarity that
struck me at some of the recent Linux10 celebrations and preparations.
Change a few names and dates, and change user share to millions rather
than thousands, and you're about on-base.  

What K&P don't get into is the licensing terms of the first Unix
systems.  AT&T was enjoined by its ongoing anti-trust restrictions
(originating in 1911) which prohibited it from selling computer systems
(1949, 1956 agreements).  This meant that Unix was largely freely
distributable among computer systems of the day in the standard format
for data interchange:  research computers on university and corporate
campuses, via magtape.  It rose to dominance on the thousands of such
systems in existence from 1975 to 1985.  This didn't change until 1985
and the final anti-trust settlement and breakup of AT&T, at which point
bitter battles for control greatly hampered the Unix market, with
impacts felt to this day in the *BSD / GNU/Linux split.

Unix's success was based on its portability, liberal distribution terms,
practical applications, "building blocks" architecture, extensibility,
and continued viability with growth in size and popularity.

Note that today, the comparative advantage along many of these
dimensions lies with GNU/Linux.  Again, it's highly portable, licensing
is more liberal than proprietary Unices (with an ideological and
pragmatic scuffle between the BSDs and Linux on licensing terms and
adoption), the core "small, simple, does one thing" applications
philosophy largely persists.  Note that GNU/Linux is now growing in
market and mindshare, at a cost to both UNIX and alternative server
systems, particularly at the small end of the scale.  See Christensen's
_The Innovator's Dilemma_ for a general illustration of principles.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>       http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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