Comment by teddyh
6 months ago
It has nothing to do with weirdness; Unix itself was plenty weird for its time. The relevant difference between Unix™ and Plan 9 is that Unix source code was given away (or cheaply licensed) to hardware companies which all wrote their own operating systems on top (SunOS, Ultrix, HP-UX, etc. etc.). This made Unix the common factor of very many commercial workstation environments. Plan 9? It was sold directly as a commercial product, for no hardware platform in particular. Nobody wanted to buy it.
People liked Unix because it was free – either really free, via BSD, or as a Unix derivative provided at no cost when people bought their workstations. A new revolutionary operating system had absolutely no reason for anybody to buy it: No commercial developers wanted to develop to a platform without users, and no users wanted a platform without software.
Plan 9 only changed their license many years later, when it was too late for anybody to care, and Unix had become the established standard.
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