> When I was walking into NEC a couple months ago with my good friend at Red Hat, I asked him why he worked at a Linux company. He told me, "Because it will be the last OS". It took me a while for that to really sink in -- but I think it has a strong chance at becoming true. Any major advances in security, compartmentability, portability, etc. will wind up in Linux. Even if they are developed in some subbranch or separate OS (QNX, Embedded, BSD), the features and code concepts could (and most likely will) find their way into Linux.
I think it's mostly true, and for me at least, Debian is the last distribution, because it's so well put together, IME. Same goes for Emacs, 'the 100 year editor'[0] and I've recently been getting into Common Lisp, 'the 100 year language'[1].
The Linux kernel has changed enough that you can't really say it's the same thing. Heck, even userland has changed substantially - who here remembers having to run MAKEDEV for userspace access to devices? But you can probably still find static binaries compiled in the late 1990's that will run on modern Linux. ABI wise, the Linux kernel is functionally backwards compatible, and that's nothing to idly dismiss. I think operating systems will keep morphing until someone makes a radical leap of progress that they can't adapt to.
That's not to say that there are no advances still to be made. But as many observed in the discussion on DevOps[2], much of the activity in the sphere of information technology looks like busy work and not progress.
[0] - https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel