Quote:
Originally Posted by guitarfreak
This news is about two months old, but I just found it digging through The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02..._to_gnu_space/
I thought this might be of interest, I also apologize if this is the wrong forum (it is news, but not directly BSD related, so maybe it should have gone in the forum other OSes). |
Not sure, but I think that Plan 9 has been forked into the Inferno project, and I think the Inferno project has always been GPL. I could be wrong about the fork. I seem to remember that the last time I went to the Plan 9 site, it had links pointing to the Inferno project. I know
The Register article implies Inferno is a different group, but I'm not sure if that's true.
The Register article has a link to a USCBerkeley download site for the Plan 9 files, so maybe Alcatel/Lucent/Bell Labs doesn't want to fiddle much with such a long-ago project. I think they had high plans for it back in the day. After so many years, Plan 9 is a little like A2/BlueBottle, in that you need just the right set of older hardware pieces/parts in order to have usable drivers and to get it running...
You're right about the lean architecture. Executables were small, even with static linking. Not sure what-all tricks were used to accomplish that, except that much ado was made of the Plan 9 compiler. The compiler could be targeted to other architectures (ARM, etc). The compiler was new for Plan 9 and used its own specific dialect of C. Here's an interesting link that summarizes the compiler:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/comp.html
It was a really interesting project, if only someone would take the initiative to update drivers and such...