This is wildly and seemingly unnecessarily chaotic and I am at a loss for its purpose. Probably just my own ignorance/laziness. But it does feel like its _trying_ to be hard to understand/navigate and overly random/weird. My curiosity got the best of me but I left feeling I just wasted 10 minutes.

EDIT: website is just an inside joke and not helpful. OS is real but also not helpful. https://www.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/1mr6cyr/comment/n8xp...

Read the FQA, Frequently Questioned Answers, for a decent introduction, though in a tongue in cheek manner.

Whatever asshole built this site - I’m in. Downloading ISO.

It's a community. Of course it has in jokes. And of course to an outsider they beg questions but the point is not to amuse outsiders.

It is possible to assert the point is to identify outsiders. Or exclude. Or test to find insiders, to welcome people who chose to align, or not.

I never invested enough to feel I'd even knocked on the door, let alone incanted a phrase to be let in. However I have known IRL and online many who did and they aren't bad people. Or even really exclusive or excluding. They just have a culture. And if it excludes the dismal or the misaligned or the fame seekers and hangers on, that's probably not just a side effect.

Compsci is littered with ingroups and outsiders. The people who get invited to Tannenbaums workshops. The people who got invited once and never again. The people who don't get invites. This is normal. Not everyone gets invited to join the royal society and not everyone wants to.

Some people assert its an intelligence test but I remain a fan of the aphorism from "war games" - the only winning move is not to play.

Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.

Is this a software or a political project?