Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> Again, we don't have alternative universes to run experiments on, but one could argue that Linux success instead of, say, FreeBSD, was more due to lucky timing […], and a better more scalable development model.

I was not thinking about FreeBSD, where it is quite certainly true, but more like a sad death of Plan 9. It seems to me that ESR is (again) wrong in claiming that

>> The long view of history may tell a different story, but in 2003 it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor.

I think it is not enough acknowledged how much exactly licensing issues and the entry cost damaged Plan 9. With the advent of both FreeBSD and Linux, there was just no reason to bother with the proprietary OS at all. Engineering decisions could cause for Plan9 to be just small community somewhere in the corner in the style of FreeBSD, Haiku, or even Hurd, which could survive and carry on the system to be a good citizen of the 21st century (not of 1980s as it is now), but because of it has been opened only when it was completely dead (April 2002), it never happened, and we have now 10 (according to Wikipedia) forks none of them compelling enough to push other ones to merge.