My favorite explanation for the well known “worse is better” observation about systems software is that it’s a downstream of the fact that worse is free.

There have been vastly superior systems to Unix but with commercial licenses.

Unix itself was a commercial system, licensed by AT&T to various other companies, that nearly fragmented itself to death before being resurrected by the free/open variants (*BSD, GNU, and Linux). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

Everything was commercial back then. My point is that mature free implementations of Unix (BSD, Linux) came before free implementations of any superior systems and so they won.

While we're playing this, I wonder what might have become of Inferno had it been Open Sourced back when it was still potentially relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

TL;DR: The Unix people make a Java.

Wow, this one somehow passed me by, thanks for sharing!

Inferno is based on plan 9 (shares kernel code)with a user space that fully runs in the VM. However, it can run on very small systems like microcontrollers and someone is currently actively exploring this: https://dboddie.gitlab.io/inferno-diary/index.html

Interesting question. I'm always curious at these other operating systems.

I was a teen at the time, but in hindsight, in '96-97 'open source' from commercial vendors wasn't the norm, and Lucent finding income from openInferno would've been big change in business model.

Java was meant to be familiar to C/C++ programmers, of which there were a lot. I'm not sure how Limbo would compare in terms of learning / productivity. And would there have been a Windows native "Inferno/Limbo" IDE type thing. (If there was one, please let me know)

Inferno would've needed a killer app. I assume it'd perform better than Java, and at the time it would've competed with small Java applets. Java desktop didn't happen, I recall Corel trying and failing to port Word Perfect to Java. I don't know how if anybody ever tried to write an office suite in Limbo.