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A comment on Introduction to Plan 9. Parent comment

Re:Introduction to Plan 9 by api on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:09PM (#38849444)
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.

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Re:Introduction to Plan 9 by Thrymr on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:36PM (#38849635)
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
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Re:Introduction to Plan 9 by api on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:54AM (#38853067)
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.
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