"Corbet's talk offered a rare, nearly unique, insight into the rise and rise of Linux over 30 years. There aren't that many developers who've been involved for so much of that time, and of those, few are good communicators who are both able to talk about and as well as actually wanting to do so. It's quite well known that Linus Torvalds himself doesn't enjoy public speaking."
"Torvalds' original 1991 announcement said that his kernel project was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU" and Corbet opened by contradicting that: So I think that we can conclude that for perhaps the only time ever, Linus Torvalds was wrong, and Linux is big and professional. As he laid out, it really did not look like that in the early days. This vulture was there, watching with interest, although I didn't try to install the thing myself until about 1995."
"The beginning of the Linux era was really the end of the Unix era, where it seemed like Unix systems proprietary Unix in particular, was going to be the operating system in the future. Unix had a good run, but the Unix vendors each made their own version and kind of made it buggy and awful in their own way, and really tore that market to pieces."
Linux grew from a hobby kernel into a large, professional operating system over thirty years. Long-term involvement by a small number of developers provided institutional memory and mentorship. The Unix era's fragmentation and proprietary vendor forks weakened Unix market coherence. Microsoft appeared poised to dominate desktops, servers, and mobile in the early 1990s. Community-driven development, openness, and adaptability enabled Linux to capture diverse roles across infrastructure. Recent shifts included experimental adoption of Rust in 2022 and attention to developer burnout and shorter long-term support lifespans in 2023. Historical perspective highlights resilience and continual evolution as core drivers.
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