I sent an email to Bell Labs a couple of weeks ago suggesting that Plan 9 be released as "public domain" code. I even suggested that this could be a great way to honour the late Dennis Ritchie (who worked there, of course), getting the code "out there" for all and sundry to use, no strings attached. Unfortunately, I didn't get a reply, so I guess the email was deleted without being read. ( Probably thought "Arrrrgh!…
The LPL which Plan 9 now uses is basically equivalent to the BSD licence. It's non-viral.
* It's not enough to be better to displace something ubiquitous (as unix like systems are today). You likely have to be orders of magnitude "better". * Do not be hostile to your potential users. (The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile, there's no need for public beatings just because someone suggests to port X11 to Plan 9 even if it's a bad idea).
> The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile I remember at FOSDEM a few years back, there was this Spanish dude and some of his friends, who were frothing-at-the-mouth fans of Plan 9, and, as they became progressively more inebriated in the place where a bunch of us were staying, he kept ranting louder and louder (and more by himself) about the perceived injustices and deficienc…
I like how you use "perceived" to modify Linux's deficiencies but "frothing-at-the-mouth" to describe individuals whose perspectives differ from yours. It's just so nicely objective.
Sam and acme are both very good; they're weird, certainly, and very different from editors before and since but they are quite nice to work in. At least the equal of vi.
I tried very seriously to use Sam instead of vi. My main criticism of it is that you have to be a pixel-perfect mouse acrobat to use it efficiently. I'm not pixel-perfect. I couldn't use the graphical parts of Sam, and that kind of negated all the rest of it. It did have some very interesting (to me, as a programmer) ways of doing things, including structural regular expressions.
It is surprisingly demanding of mice; you need to have a three button mouse and ideally with a separate button, as chording on the mouse wheel can be error prone. I try to switch now and again but I never really stay; particularly with acme I find I like the way wily (a nominal clone) did the current working directory better; easier to create utility files.
But it is a really good editor, just not to my taste.
> The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile I remember at FOSDEM a few years back, there was this Spanish dude and some of his friends, who were frothing-at-the-mouth fans of Plan 9, and, as they became progressively more inebriated in the place where a bunch of us were staying, he kept ranting louder and louder (and more by himself) about the perceived injustices and deficienc…
I like how you use "perceived" to modify Linux's deficiencies but "frothing-at-the-mouth" to describe individuals whose perspectives differ from yours. It's just so nicely objective.
Reading comprehension: "perceived" refers to the "injustices of a world ..." in my comment. Also, I've met plenty of people who disagree with me who don't froth at the mouth. For instance, BSD vs Linux used to be a Topic of Debate on the internet, and often the BSD guys would be fairly rational about what they preferred (of course some of them frothed too, just like some of the Linux fans).