
Why Didn't Plan 9 Succeed? - wmhorne
What prevented Plan 9 from Bell Labs from becoming a widely-used operating system? Does it have a major flaw?
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thristian
Tons of reasons, really.

Unix was originally given away, but then it got wildly popular and Bell Labs
regretted they couldn't capture much of the value it created. When Plan 9 came
around, they were much, much stricter about it, and so it was much less
accessible.

Unix was possibly the first widely-available operating system with its
particular ethos - frustratingly simple and hackable. Plan 9 has much the same
ethos, but wound up having to compete with Unix, which had a decades-long
head-start.

Possibly the biggest problem Plan 9 has, though, is how well-designed it is.
Unix was probably well-designed in its early days, but by the early 90s when
Plan 9 came around, it'd been hacked up and contorted to all sorts of use-
cases the designers never intended, like networking and graphical terminals.
Plan 9 re-unified all these use-cases into a small set of elegant, orthogonal
features... but it made anything outside those features even more awkward and
difficult. For example, a web-browser doesn't make much sense in a Plan 9
world - you'd just run remote applications and have them display locally,
rather than having a special local application that all remote applications
must run inside. But it's hard to do anything in the modern world without a
web-browser, so Plan 9 isn't a practical alternative for most people.

~~~
greenyouse
This. Do you currently use Plan 9 for your operating system at home?

By not making the operating system abstractions similar to other existing
operating systems all popular applications had to be rewritten for Plan 9.
There was a network effect of existing apps that worked well enough and
developers were already familiar with the existing systems which made it hard
for users to switch over.Plan 9 was a better operating system technically but
it didn't have the utility that existing operating systems already provided to
users.

Non-computer people would also probably just use whatever OS the computer they
bought had. Using something outside of MacOS or Windows was not normal for a
non-technical person in the mid 90s.

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Isamu
The same people built Plan 9 and learned from their experience building Unix
to make an operating system that was like Unix, only more so.

But Unix was originally built under the Bell System monopoly and they were
restricted from selling it, and it wasn't developed as an actual product
anyway (Ken was basically disobeying his manager in developing it) so they
gave it away free, with source code, to whoever requested it (mostly
universities. Early distributions on magtape reportedly included the note
"Love, from Ken.")

Plan 9 was post-monopoly, so it was a "PRODUCT" and marketed with various
licensing restrictions and you had to pay for it (with maybe a by-seat
pricing? Can't remember.) And by then it was competing with all kinds of
OFFICIAL Unix variants with real support offered, plus MS-DOS and the first
Windows, and also Apple was in the mix.

People didn't get the point of an operating system that made good use of a
network that most people didn't use at that time. And compute servers? What is
that all about? It just didn't resonate with anybody at the time, although it
provided all the abstractions we tend to care about more now.

~~~
m463
Sounds a lot like the PS/2.

IBM developed the PC with an open architecture and it took off.

IBM realized it didn't control things enough, so it released the PS/2 with the
microchannel bus and OS/2 and...

nobody cared.

------
CyberFonic
I have tinkered with Plan 9 on several occasions. I keep coming back to it
because I appreciate its technical and architectural elegance. It is somewhat
like yet another example of the VHS vs Betamax situation.

Some things that stop me from using it more widely are:

The GUI: I just can't relate to the aesthetics nor the heavy dependence on the
mouse. Granted that I have used it from the shell, but then I also miss out on
some niceties and conveniences.

The security mechanism: I understand the intent of the security mechanisms,
but have have difficulty in understanding it sufficiently to configure a
cluster of Plan 9 systems using some old HP ePCs.

Device drivers: This is a common problem with most non-mainstream OSes. There
are too many incompatible devices out there and thus device drivers are either
written for some limited common denominator, e.g. VGA and its variants, or
simply for what the developers had on hand. We only need to look at the Linux
kernel to see that a substantial part of its development is devoted to
supporting the widest variety of devices.

I think that the Plan 9 experiment could be re-positioned as an IoT OS. That
is an area that I am very interested in.

BTW: check out Russ Cox's implementation of Plan 9 using the vx32 sandboxing
on Linux and OS X ([https://swtch.com/9vx](https://swtch.com/9vx)).

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maxharris
I think it was the restrictive licenses. They made certain that no company
could invest in it, give it a good GUI.

Most companies can’t survive/thrive the way that RedHat did. Not saying it
can’t ever work, but it definitely was a factor in keeping plan9 from getting
popular.

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runjake
Many would argue Plan 9 did succeed -- as a research OS. Many of its ideas and
concepts trickled into other OSes.

There are many reasons for it's failure to gain traction as a general purpose
OS, but one major one is that it was never marketed as a general use OS. It
was always in the realm of a research OS. So that all but "doomed" it from the
start.

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drablyechoes
A lot of concepts that originated in plan 9 have been widely adopted by modern
unix-like operating systems, most notably the /proc file system, so in a
certain sense I would say that it was a successful project.

Lack of applications, drivers and compelling use cases ultimately caused the
project itself to fail. It was also competing against operating systems with
huge commercial backing that already had deeply entrenched market share.

~~~
wahern
procfs predates Plan 9: [http://lucasvr.gobolinux.org/etc/Killian84-Procfs-
USENIX.pdf](http://lucasvr.gobolinux.org/etc/Killian84-Procfs-USENIX.pdf)

~~~
mennis
Meh. That is research from the same group that was thinking about the problems
with Unix and could be argued is an early expression of some of the ideas that
became plan9. Seems a little like saying Linux predates Linux since the
terminal code that Linus based his first release on existed before he trashed
his FS.

