Company Nokia, in 2015 by the company Alcatel-Lucent, which belonged to the research center Bell Labs , about the transfer of the whole project related Plan 9 intellectual property of the non-profit organization Plan 9 Foundation , which will oversee the further development of Plan 9. At the same time announced the publication PLAN9 code under the permissive MIT license In addition to Lucent Public License and GPL licenses, under which the code has spread earlier.
The main idea of Plan 9 is associated with the erase of differences between local and remote resources. The system is a distributed medium based on three basic principles: all resources can be viewed as a hierarchical file set; no difference in access to local and external resources; Each process has its own changeable namespace. To create a single distributed hierarchy of resource files, the 9P protocol is used.