Do you also think the past of open source was made of spotless heroes?
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of speaking at my city’s Linux Day with a short talk titled “Rust in the Linux Kernel.” The presentation sparked interesting discussions: younger attendees approached me during the break to dive deeper into technical details, while some of the more experienced ones raised ideological questions.
I noticed that even today, some people are still bothered by open source projects sponsored or supported by companies—as if that made them somehow impure. But the truth is, the idealized past many people long for never really existed.
Take the C language, for example—it was born in AT&T’s labs, not in the basement of some flawless hero. And the Linux kernel itself didn’t emerge to overthrow any kind of power, but from a purely technical dispute.
Maybe if we stopped idealizing and distorting reality, we’d have more time (and clarity) to build even higher-quality technology.