> As disruptive as they really are, the patents and > NDA are not a culprit here. > Plan 9 suffers from small hobbyist community.
This was exactly how I analyzed the situation myself - until I randomly stumbled on United States Patent 8,380,765 for multi-pipes, which completely changed my perceptions on this issue. There is really no way to describe the fury and offense I feel at this patent for an implementation McIlroy's original free pipe/array concept as a synthetic fs of pipe-like files. If I was a totally different kind of person, I could probably try to file software patents based on my own work, since everyone knows its just a matter of getting implementations of basic principles done in a slightly new way and getting the patent put together so that its specific enough to squeak by in comparison to other pre-existing patents, but general enough to be used as a weapon against people doing things which are merely similar. That's why you pay the big bucks to the lawyers. I am not a lawyer, I am a law professor's son, and he spent 30 years explaining to me exactly how the game works. I was only vaguely batty before I discovered that "muxing pipes as a 9p fs with a granular control interface" as an implementation of McIlroy's original concept for freeform grids and processing arrays is something that IBM has now patented. I highly doubt this patent is a lonely island in the sea. I would imagine that there are plenty more basic ideas in computer science which can be redone as a 9p fs and then patented again. The HARE paper claims that one of the successul goals of the project was raising the profile of 9p in the scientific community. I have absolutely zero clue what Plan 9 related patents might be - pardon the phrase - in the pipeline, but I think that the potential growing relevance of 9P for commercial distributed applications might have a lot to do with why we don't see more posts from people doing work in that area. Ben Kidwell "mycroftiv"
