Guest post by The funky second OS from the Unix masterminds, Plan 9, has been fully transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation, and it’s been released under the MIT license.
We are thrilled to announce that Nokia has transferred the copyright of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation. This transfer applies to all of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs code, from the earliest days through their final release.
The most exciting immediate effect of this is that the Plan 9 Foundation is making the historical 1st through 4th editions of Plan 9 available under the terms of the MIT license. These are the releases as they existed at the time, with minimal changes to reflect the above.
The historical releases are at the Foundation’s website. Nokia also posted a press release which gives some more background about Plan 9 for those who may not know about its history.
Good news. Great to see the experience, knowledge and Plan 9’s code base shared, for the benefit of the world.
Yes, this is a welcome move. But I am confused about if there is any connection between the foundation and 9front?
There might be some overlap.
9front People: http://9front.org/who/
P9F: http://9p.io/wiki/plan9/people/index.html
I thought Plan9 was open source…
Parts and some versions were. This is everything from the beginning, from my understanding.
Hopefully with this steps comming more software to Plan9
They say, that GBOME, KDE, Firefox and so on don’t run on Plan9
https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/faq/index.html#GETTING_STARTED_WITH_PLAN_9
On *BSD, Haiku, ReactOS and a lot of more younger operating systems, it can be run on.
I think, at first have to be created ports of GTK+, Qt, Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, VLC, WINE, etc for Plan 9.
Then it needs more driver and so on. Possibly it can be using parts of *BSD.
If that isn’t happen, Plan 9 also be in the future only an academic thing. For real use are then “only” the OpenSource-Systems Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, Haiku, .. etc.
You have to understand that Plan9 does not use X at all. To port KDE, GNOME and etc would be: 1. A huge undertaking and 2. Totally unnecessary. Plan9 is not UNIX or a UNIX clone. You know that GUI you see when you boot up Plan9? Yeah, it was planned ahead of time. X was not… Although a version of X HAS been ported in the past. Your best bet to use Firefox etc would be a VM. IIRC, they use it on 9front
I meant X was not planned for UNIX (and not even for Plan9 too lol)
I think what you mean to say, is that UNIX and UNIX-likes are command line OSes, and any GUI is essentially just a 3rd party program running on top, unlike Windows or Haiku (or Plan9), for example, which have no native way of running command-line only.
Plan9 has it’s own shell (RS), which could be viewed as being similar in purpose to the Unix shell, and it can run just fine without a GUI. It has a very simple/bare bones windowing system.
Plan9 is a research distributed OS, it was mainly a research/teaching tool for some research labs and universities. As such it’s audience is very specialized.
@The123king yes
Why should it be unnecessary to have more software?
Which office suite is used on Plan9?
Which Mediaplayer is used on Plan9?
Which browser is used on Plan9?
An operating system without software is senseless.
It is a huge undertaking to bring that software to Plan9, because it don’t use X?
But why is it then possible for Haiku to have
– Blender https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/blender-2-81-is-working-on-haiku/9235
– KDE https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/kde-frameworks-5-and-kde-apps/6170
– Krita https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-iconset-for-krita/10176/8
– Qt 5.3 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/qt-5-3-for-haiku-progress/3698/84
– Qt 6 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/the-next-generation-of-qt-6-is-now/10178/3
– GTK+ https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-backend-in-gtk-gdk/9338/14
– GTK+ 3 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/ported-gtk3-live/7687/14
– VLC https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/improving-vlc-2-2-8-for-haiku/8754
– LibreOffice https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/libreoffice-is-now-available-for-haiku/6917
– Java https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/java-swing/8936
– more Java https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/apps-that-i-use-on-haiku-openjdk/3104
– Lazarus GUI for FreePascal https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/lazarus-1-9-trunk-qt4-and-qt5-interface-screenshots/5767
– Godot game engine https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/godot-on-haiku/9171/20
– some games https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/gaming-on-haiku/3928/74
– etc.
And yes, X existing for Haiku, too:
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/x11-support-for-haiku/10502/16
If it is possible for Haiku, why is it then not possible for Plan9?
Without a lot of programs, Plan9 is for me something like TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
Apparently, at no point did it occur to you to get some basic information about Plan9 before writing all that crap. It would have literally taken you less time to go check out the intro paragraph about Plan9 on wikipedia, than all the wasted effort in cutting and pasting all those useless and unrelated links.
Plan9 is a research distributed OS, which has nothing to do with Haiku.
If it is only for research, why then the foundation?
If you have a research project, you try for a limited time someting out. And after the limited time, the project will die or lift up to a real project.
Plan 9 was created after Unix and is older then Linux, Haiku and other systems.
There existing a fork called 9Front.
And now there is created a foundation for Plan9.
And all for a research project?
Yes, all that for a research project. It was used among several universities and was sourced/referred in lots of papers.
The foundation is just to have a legal entity to hold the copyright for the code, papers, and conference proceedings/organizations.
I have no idea why you think “foundation” and “research” are somehow mutually exclusive concepts.