Yes, one can't stress enough how much Plan 9 is not Unix.
When Bell Labs eventually gave up on Research Unix and started from scratch they deliberately broke with almost every standard and convention in existence.
The programming language (Plan 9 has its own C dialect), breaking with POSIX, abolishing the process/thread dualism and doing away with the root user just to name a few.
By getting rid of all these inherited liabilities they were able to create a much slicker, much more uniform and most importantly truly network centric OS, which in many aspects (not necessarily in terms of performance) still surpasses modern unix-derived operating systems(you know...the usual suspects).
On the other hand the lack of backwards compatibility and the high barrier of entry prevented Plan 9's widespread adoption outside the research community.
On the contrary if we need new functionality today the way to go seems to be piling new layers of abstraction on top of the already overly complex stuff we gatherd over the years until everything becomes an incomprehensible mess of special cases(16 million loc linux kernel, anyone?).
That of course is a good ol' tradition, which started when we first fumbled network support into the unix kernel and thereby broke the open-read-write-close interface convention.
The programming language (Plan 9 has its own C dialect), breaking with POSIX, abolishing the process/thread dualism and doing away with the root user just to name a few.
By getting rid of all these inherited liabilities they were able to create a much slicker, much more uniform and most importantly truly network centric OS, which in many aspects (not necessarily in terms of performance) still surpasses modern unix-derived operating systems(you know...the usual suspects). On the other hand the lack of backwards compatibility and the high barrier of entry prevented Plan 9's widespread adoption outside the research community.
On the contrary if we need new functionality today the way to go seems to be piling new layers of abstraction on top of the already overly complex stuff we gatherd over the years until everything becomes an incomprehensible mess of special cases(16 million loc linux kernel, anyone?). That of course is a good ol' tradition, which started when we first fumbled network support into the unix kernel and thereby broke the open-read-write-close interface convention.
To summerize: Plan 9 is not Unix. Thankfully...