Michael Jeffrey: There are a variety of technologies that offer support for distributed applications development. But they are typically characterised by being complex and not useable by devices large and small. For example, many people say that CORBA is extraordinarily complex, and if the thickness of the books are any indication, they may be right. Similar comments could be made regarding DCOM, SOAP and .Net.
8.Why do your customers choose Inferno?
Michael Jeffrey: Our typical customer is one that has a small device that must be connected to a network of other computers. For these customer Inferno’s ability to be the embedded OS on their hardware is of paramount importance. Added to this their ability to easily write distributed applications that run on their hardware and other existing systems gives them a big commercial advantage in terms of time to market.
9.Can you tell us about any particular case studies or customers? Or where people might be using Inferno and Plan 9?
Michael Jeffrey: The most interesting products involving Inferno are currently covered by NDA with our customers. He would say that wouldn’t he I hear you say – but it is true. There are some products that you can see on our website from UMEC in Taiwan (Screen phone) and Broadcom in Korea.
10.What has the adoption of Plan 9 and Inferno been like?
Michael Jeffrey: We have customers in 50+ countries in every continent, except Antarctica. Every night the hosted version of Inferno is downloaded by tens of new customers and on one occasion we had 5,000+ downloads in a single evening.
There are many corporate subscribers. Naturally Lucent, but also Compaq, Samsung, Toshiba, Texas Instruments and others. I don’t think that there is a single consumer electronics company that hasn’t begun evaluating Inferno for their small and medium sized devices.
We are already profitable with the sale of box sets, subscriptions, tech services and application development.
11. What is Vita Nuova’s a typical customer?
Michael Jeffrey: Consumer electronics manufacturers and network element builders, primarily, but there are also a large number of academics and enthusiasts who are using the technology.
12.Can you characterize the typical individual developer that selects to work with Inferno?
Michael Jeffrey: This is hard to do but they are often mature computer scientists that have experienced (or endured) several decades of computing and are not easily fobbed off with the development environments offered by other, often very large, software companies.
13. How would you describe the Plan 9 and Inferno community?
Michael Jeffrey: It feels a little like the early Linux-community; a community of software scientists who are disillusioned with the existing technologies that are available.
14. What’s the best way for a potential developer or customer to experience Inferno?
Michael Jeffrey: Inferno runs in a variety of existing platforms in a hosted environment. As an example, right now anyone can run Inferno apps under the Inferno plugin for Internet Explorer. We’re planning the plugin for Netscape browsers in Windows and Linux for Q2 2002. We’ve had a couple of technical hurdles.
Once the plugin is installed, users can test it out with some lighthearted examples like Tetris and Minesweeper on our site.
15. What licensing covers Plan 9 and Inferno?
Michael Jeffrey: Neither OS is Open-Source. However, we think that the licensing and pricing is attractive to individuals and corporate users alike. Anyone who wants to know more can find the Inferno and Plan 9 licenses on our site.
16. Terrific, your site has a lot of information.
Michael Jeffrey: We worked hard in recent months to get stuff for all types; press, markets and the heavy duty technical stuff. There can be a great volume of material and we try to get it up on the site as quickly as possible. I think we do a pretty good job.
- "Part I of the Interview"
- "Part II of the Interview"
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