“The ubiquity of PC hardware has been mirrored in the software
market, where a handful of operating systems are firmly entrenched
and new systems find it difficult to attract interest to
themselves. In today’s editorial, Rob Pike of Bell Laboratories
gives his reflections on the state of systems software research,
drawing on his own experiences working on Plan 9 and
Inferno….”
“Linux’s success may indeed be the single strongest argument
for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old
operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software
research community has failed to fill.“
“Besides, Linux’s cleverness is not in the software, but in the
development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially
software engineering) by any measure.”