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Other BSD and UNIX/UNIX-like Any other flavour of BSD or UNIX that does not have a section of its own.

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Old 25th April 2014
guitarfreak guitarfreak is offline
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Default Plan 9 may not be dead yet.

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/
Quote:
Plan 9, a successor to Unix developed during the 1980s by Bell Labs, is now available under the GNU Public Licence.

The operating system was never particularly popular or prevalent, but did generate enough of a following to spark a successor of its own known as Inferno. We also wrote it up last year, saying that “Compared to modern Unix, it's also very minimal and lightweight.” Which is a good thing.

The world of Plan 9 is not fast-moving, with the OS released to the general public for non-commercial use in 1995 and then made available to all and sundry under the Lucent Public Licence in 2002. That licence, say GNU folks, is less-than ideal “because of its choice of law clause.” The Lucent licence specifies “the State of New York and the intellectual property laws of the United States of America” as the jurisdictions governing interpretation of its terms and conditions. GNU therefore recommends it is fine to footle around with Plan 9 under the licence, but not to release your own software with Lucent's legalese.

That advice is now moot, because The University of California, Berkely, last week quietly let it be known that it “has been authorised by Alcatel-Lucent to release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.”
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).
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Old 1st May 2014
censored censored is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by guitarfreak View Post
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...

Last edited by censored; 2nd May 2014 at 12:11 PM.
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Old 2nd May 2014
censored censored is offline
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Default Plan 9 ... Inferno

I stopped being lazy and checked the wiki. Inferno was created by Bell Labs, and "based on" the experience gained from the Plan 9 development. Then after three years Inferno was sold to VitNuova, who themselves sold it for awhile as a commercial product. Some years later it was released under the GPL, but the last update of the OS (according to Wikipedia) was over four years ago. Inferno seems to be going the way of the original Plan 9.
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Old 2nd May 2014
frcc frcc is offline
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Are you using the system and for what purpose?
i.e. (To solve a specific problem, novelty use, education, testing, programming, other)
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Old 7th October 2014
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I think this re-licensing had something to do with Akaros.
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Old 8th October 2014
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sacerdos_daemonis sacerdos_daemonis is offline
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The last time I read the information on the Plan 9 and Inferno websites, I got the impression that Plan 9 is still active, but development is slow (still no word processor and East Asian language support, for example), and that Inferno is a fork focusing on imbedded devices/software. If my interpretation is close, it would mean the two are sister projects with different foci and Inferno has more resouces, allowing quicker development.
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Old 8th October 2014
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sacerdos_daemonis View Post
The last time I read the information on the Plan 9 and Inferno websites, I got the impression that Plan 9 is still active, but development is slow (still no word processor
I recall that a slimmed down Tex distribution was ported to Plan 9. And you have troff of course. By word processing, do you mean the goofy cartoonish looking programs like libreoffice or MS word, or do include the more enjoyable ways to create a document too?
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Old 9th October 2014
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It was something I read in their documentation a while back. In their words, the system did not yet have a word processor. Whether that means no word processing at all, or no advanded printing utilities, or something else, I do not know. I just spent some time at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ trying to find the reference, but did not see it. It was one of the items in a short to do list. I might go through the introductory documentation again some day, so I can post that information. If I can find it again.

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Old 20th December 2014
muflon muflon is offline
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I thought It's a good Idea to post It here.

Searching for some notes about Plan B in LSUB; I found documents related to Second International Workshop on Plan 9, that took place in Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ, US, on the 3rd and 4th of December, 2007.

LSUB also provide video presentations to these meeting, beside Francisco Ballesteros [e.g. Notes on the Plan 9 3rd edition Kernel source] and several others that I recognize from books and other documents; Dennis M. Ritchie was giving a speech about: Unix and Beyond: Themes in Operating System Research.

Download index - IWP9-Ritchie.mov - time: 56:60
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