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Your stated reasons aren't valid. I think they ported Mozilla until 2002 (Russ Cox, maybe?). There was also a compat layer: APE.

As a counter to your argument: a system that has little capability compared to the well-established alternatives, starts from nothing, yet takes over the world: Linux.

I really believe there was no greater reason for Plan 9's failure to catch on (or at least it's ideas) than my peers not being interested in their own education.

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I read the plan-9 papers and was excited to play with it. I had a .edu affiliation and it was still $500 for a tap eand license and a letter saying what you planned to do with it... or some such. I had no budget, so we used linux.

They did open it up eventually, after linux had quite the following. It it had been open/available it would have had a chance.

It sounded fine the first time I heard it, but I don't buy the "it wasn't free and Linux was available" argument any more. If more Linux users had read the papers like you, and done so early enough, they might have had an aggregate influence on Linux's design when it was still malleable. A Plan9-like Linux would have been just as good as Plan9 eventually.

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