>From what I've read it seems like the lack of ubiquity forced the Plan 9 guys out of Plan 9 and back into Ubuntu or OpenBSD
That's… interestingly ahistorical. No one was force back from plan 9 to ubuntu or openbsd because when plan 9 "lost" neither existed. Plan 9's window of opportunity existed in the early '90s when linux and the web weren't firmly established.
Unfortunately Plan 9 wasn't released with a proper license until 2002, at that point Linux had already won the war (for half a decade), the problems that plan 9 solved had been solved in other ways (perhaps less elegantly) by the rest of the world, plan 9 lagged behind on a number of important areas and bell labs were being downsized significantly.
I said this after reading this conversation [0] on comp.os.plan9 about rc. Though it does appear that I misread that as well. However, my point was that it seems like the shift away from Plan 9 or 9front or whatever took place in the late 2000s when they moved to Ubuntu or OpenBSD due to work concerns because it was easier to support the masses. (I cannot find the conversation on comp.os.plan9 to support that though.)
That's… interestingly ahistorical. No one was force back from plan 9 to ubuntu or openbsd because when plan 9 "lost" neither existed. Plan 9's window of opportunity existed in the early '90s when linux and the web weren't firmly established.
Unfortunately Plan 9 wasn't released with a proper license until 2002, at that point Linux had already won the war (for half a decade), the problems that plan 9 solved had been solved in other ways (perhaps less elegantly) by the rest of the world, plan 9 lagged behind on a number of important areas and bell labs were being downsized significantly.