Rumors of the Death of Plan 9 Greatly Exaggerated

So slashdot, always bastion of reliable news reporting, had to bring the news: "Bell Labs Unix Group Disbanded", from this others went on to deduce that Plan 9 development has stopped.

Nothing further from the truth, not only is Plan 9 development at Bell Labs ongoing but development outside the Labs is as active as ever(and expect more news on this front soon).

Sape Mullender wrote to 9fans:

1127 ceased to exist some time ago.  The department was renamed and got a
much longer number which, of course, I can no longer remember.  The current
split of what's left of 1127 is not considered to be a big deal by most
members of the department.  There have always been many interdepartmental
collaborations, so 1127 has always been more of a management entity than a
group/club/fraternity.

 [...]

 Plan 9 is alive and reasonably well as our current vehicle for wireless
systems research.  Plan 9 has gone embedded (but rest assured, all our
wireless software runs in user space, using Plan 9's real-time scheduler to
make sure it runs when it needs to.

 Using Plan 9, wireless code becomes useful in a fraction of the time that
code can be made to run on all those commercial embedded operating systems
(which I do not care to mention) and also much quicker than on Linux which I
am sorry to say is just too large and illegible.

May the research go on!

And don't let the "Fourth Edition" release date fool you, Plan 9 ISOs are built from the latest code every night, and the current codebase is very far from what Fourth Edition was, it's just that nobody has been bothered to make a new "official" release. Plan 9, as usual, is more about code and quality than about hype and buzzwords.