Re:Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
by chasil on Friday July 29, 2022 @10:55AM
(#32277749)
I think also that BSD (and later Linux) made UNIX free, and I assume Plan 9 was not.
UNIX was also written to run on minimal hardware. Even if Multics had been open-sourced, UNIX would still have won.
Plan 9 was supposed to be the better designed UNIX all around and it did not even dent it. It wasn't significantly better that UNIX to displace it.
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
> We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’.[154] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
> The long view of history may tell a different story, but in 2003 it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.