It takes no effort to be a wet blanket; all you have to do is lie there, covered in water, and drown out anyone else trying to do anything.

How many emails/comments/posts EXACTLY like what you just wrote happened in 1991?

No one is saying what Plan9 will or won't become, but that also means you have no idea where it is going in 10 years or what fun innovations will come out of it.

Don't make a habit of shitting on people thinking outside the box, you'll miss a lot of interesting things.

Even if Plan 9 and 9front go nowhere, the ideas have already crept into other operating systems and userland tools. Linux has had 'mount --bind' for a while, and has last year introduced in-kernel support for 9P2000 (for mounting Plan 9 resources). bash and gawk have some weak support for interacting with the network via the filesystem. wmii actually speaks 9P2000 and uses it for scripting.

If you can't see the point of operating systems research, how else would you like to see the state of the art advanced?

Plan 9 was the first system to use UTF-8 and a /proc filesystem such as the one used in Linux.