Bell Releases Open Source Plan 9
Just the third release since its inception more than a decade ago, Bell Labs yesterday announced the availability of its operating system entitled Plan 9. This update is the first in five years, and has been open-sourced with code and documentation available from Bell Labs. This project was initiated in the late 1980's and has always planned to be "for production-quality distributed computing in a networked environmentfor production-quality distributed computing in a networked environment".
Bell Labs, responsible for the development of UNIX and the C and C++ programming languages, has made many improvements to the operating system since its second release. The main goal of the system has remained throughout its development.
Plan 9 makes communication the central aspect of its computing power, and allows users to name and access all system resources as if they were files. Various groups and access levels can be granted to these resources, much like NT works with networked file systems and computers.
This operating system uses a single protocol to communicate with the network, the user interface, and all files as well as hardware distributed across the network, giving the computer a vast number of resources to pull from for operating procedures. This allows users to run programs from different computers across the network in a single session "without needing to know or care about the details."
According to Bell Labs:
In a typical implementation - as part of the infrastructure for a work group - Plan 9 allows each user to customize a virtually private computing environment and then recreate it at any networked terminal, anywhere. The system does this by delivering a private view of shared resources, including processing power, data, programs, and communication services.
A more prosaic use is to simplify system administration for a community of users who may or may not know that Plan 9 is providing their connections to printers, servers, and other resources. Plan 9 also could be used to operate special-purpose devices such as personal firewalls for secure access to university networks, corporate intranets, or the public Internet.
Other changes in Plan 9 include improvements in the kernel and graphical interface. The command set has been updated, and the system can now resolve ambiguous file names. "Plumbing" has been added as a means for two interactive programs to communicate with eachother.
For more information about Plan 9, visit Bell Labs.