Lucent launches open source operating system

Lucent's latest attempt to take over the web server space has been named after the worst sci-fi movie of all time.

The company has released an operating system called Plan 9, a film so bad that its star actor Bela Lugosi had the good sense to die half way through making it.

Plan 9 is geared towards e-business and distributed computing. It was conceived in the late 1980s but was made available last weekfor the first time free of charge and open source from the Lucent website.

According to Lucent, the Plan 9 OS is well placed for running secure e-business web servers. It uses a single protocol to communicate and exchange data with resources such as processes, programs, and stored data.

Lucent also said Plan 9 provides a uniform way of accessing e-business resources distributed across a network of servers and client terminals, and other devices such as PDAs.

Rob Pike, a director at Lucent's Bell Labs, said that users could operate a number of different programs from physically dispersed computers in a single session. Plan 9 is said to include software and hardware generally considered incompatible on different platforms.

Dan Kusnetzky, VP for systems software research at analyst IDC, said the product is more robust than the cardboard sets of the film. Plan 9 has the same advantages as its predecessor, Unix, but shows "striking new thinking. It's small, powerful and very flexible", he said.

Kusnetzky added: "This is a competitor to Linux and Unix, but it doesn't have the commercial development tools, database products, applications, middleware, or serverware that the other platforms now have."

He added that Plan 9 may find most use for web-based applications, e-business, and possibly for technical computing, but that the product would be held back because "the technology is simply too raw".