Plan 9 From Bell Labs Operating System Now Available Under GPLv2

TopSpin writes "Alcatel-Lucent has authorized The University of California, Berkeley to 'release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.' Plan 9 was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 has subsequently emerged as Inferno, a commercially supported derivative, and ports to various platforms, including a recent port to the Raspberry Pi. In Plan 9, all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user interface, are represented through the file system rather than specialized interfaces. The system provides a generic protocol, 9P, to perform all communication with the system, among processes and with network resources. Applications compose resources using union file systems to form isolated namespaces."

Comments

Still holds up

[Anonymous Coward]

A model for consistency and simplicity. It validated the concepts underlying Unix, and influenced modern Linux/BSD. It also didn't hurt that they had some category-1 geniuses working on it - Kernighan, Ritchie, Duff, etc.

I find it interesting

[Fri13]

I like the idea how everything is a file etc. That is one reason why I originally became Linux user and now it feels Linux systems have become something totally different by new third/fourth generation "geeks" who don't care anymore about open file system and results are like systemd journalctl.

Re:I find it interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a file.

Re:I find it interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom is a bmp.

Re:I find it interesting

[icebike]

I like the idea how everything is a file etc. That is one reason why I originally became Linux user and now it feels Linux systems have become something totally different by new third/fourth generation "geeks" who don't care anymore about open file system and results are like systemd journalctl.

Sad that they held on to it just long enough for it to become irrelevant. Anything unique that it had to offer has probably been done in other ways.

I suspect that between various BSDs and Linux versions that the concept of everything being a file has pretty much reached its logical endpoint.
Eventually you have to talk to highly interactive hardware with massively parallel threads and then the paradigm starts to become unhinged, and you spend more time trying to defend and extend the paradigm than anything else.

Re:I find it interesting

[suy]

I like the idea how everything is a file etc. That is one reason why I originally became Linux user and now it feels Linux systems have become something totally different by new third/fourth generation "geeks" who don't care anymore about open file system and results are like systemd journalctl.

Funny that you mention that, because systemd exposes lots of features through cgroups and a nice filesystem on /sys. And to use systemd's journal's files, the documentaion already explains that you just open the files, memory map them, and use inotify, a classic notification API on files...

Hot grits

[Hognoxious]

I'm running Plan9 in a VM hosted on Hurd (sorry, that's GNU/Hurd) on a computer I made on a 3D printer that I bought with bitcoins.

Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia Bennet Haselton is waiting for a long pompous article about how everyone else is wrong and beta is great written by ME!!!!

The link is a license

[phantomfive]

The link in the article links to the license. Kind of cool, I guess, but if you're actually looking for the source code, it's available at Github.

Re:The link is a license

[Zontar The Mindless]

Or if you're looking for a live image to play with...

Re:Dead end

[peragrin]

oddly enough Plan 9 is from the guys who invented Unix who were trying to reinvent it.

Re:Dead end

[Half-pint HAL]

What about an OS where everything is a potato?

I tried that once. Unfortunately when I ran it full multitasking on a multicore processor, the timeslicing just left me with a bag of chips....