Opinion The Rusting of Linux proceeds apace. Of course there are problems, some technical, some very human. Last week saw one of the leading Rusties sign off from the project, quoting "non-technical" barriers to progress.
That'll be people, then. As Linux makes its way through its 30s, it will face challenges new to it but very familiar to those who study cultural or generational change. The magnitude of Linux's success is hard to quantify.
It has gone from an experiment in operating system design and communal development to fulfill a dream of many commercial software vendors: an OS that can run everywhere. The biggest supercomputers, the smallest embedded devices, mobile and desktop, education, commerce, science and industry. It vitalizes the very new and sustains the very old.
It has survived concentrated legal attacks from outside and bitter divisions within. Technically, economically, culturally, and pragmatically, Linux has revolutionized computing in ways that look beyond impossible from the perspective of the early 1990s whence it came. A very large part of this is due to its underpinnings in C and its lineage.
C was designed to foster high-performance system software that was quick to develop, frugal in its environment, close enough to the hardware to almost match the performance of native machine code yet easily portable to new architectures. Combine a tool like that with the unencumbered no-need-to-ask freedom of open source, and people who just wanted to be left al.