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Linux at 25: Linus Torvalds on the evolution and future of Linux
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux/linux-at-25-linus-torvalds-on-the-evolution-and-future-of-linux.html

By Paul Venezia
The last time I had the occasion to interview Linus Torvalds, it was 2004, and version 2.6 of the Linux kernel had been recently released. I was working on a feature titled “Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise.” The opening sentence was “If commercial Unix vendors weren’t already worried about Linux, they should be now.” How prophetic those words turned out to be. More than 12 years later -- several lifetimes in the computing world -- Linux can be found in every corner of the tech world. What started as a one-man project now involves thousands of developers. On this, its 25th anniversary, I once again reached out to Torvalds to see whether he had time to answer some questions regarding Linux’s origins and evolution, the pulse of Linux’s current development community, and how he sees operating systems and hardware changing in the future. He graciously agreed. The following interview offers Torvalds’ take on the future of x86, changes to kernel development, Linux containers, and how shifts in computing and competing OS upgrade models might affect Linux down the line. Linux’s origins were in low-resource environments, and coding practices were necessarily lean. That’s not the case today in most use cases. How do you think that has affected development practices for the kernel or operating systems in general? I think your premise is incorrect: Linux's origins were definitely not all that low-resource. The 386 was just about the beefiest machine you could buy as a workstation at the time, and while 4MB or 8MB of RAM sounds ridiculously constrained today, and you'd say "necessarily lean," at the time it didn't feel that way at all. So I felt like I had memory and resources to spare even back 25 years ago and not at all constrained by hardware. And hardware kept getting better, so as Linux grew -- and, perhaps more importantly, as the workloads you could use Linux for grew -- we still didn't feel very constrained by hardware resources. From a development angle, I don't think things have changed all that much. If anything, I think that these days when people are trying to put Linux in some really tiny embedded environments (IoT), we actually have developers today that feel more constrained than kernel developers felt 25 years ago. It sounds odd, since those IoT devices tend to be more powerful than that original 386 I started on, but we've grown (a lot) and people’s expectations have grown, too...