Canadian, sysadmin, trans rights are human rights, puncha-the-nazis, cats are pretty great, GNU Terry Pratchett.
I don’t think that is necessarily out of the running yet. OS development is expensive and low profit. Commodification may be inevitable. Control of the shell and GUI, where they can push advertisements and shovelware and telemetry on you, that is profitable.
So in 20 years, 50? I predict proprietary OSes will die out eventually, balance of probability.
Yeah, making it reliable enough not to need an escape system is the goal. One of the original concepts was that in a stage 1 failure outside black zones (also, Starship on paper does a great job minimizing the black zones due to re-entry design), stage 2 will light up and go for a powered landing. A stage “explosion” is usually very energetic but more burny-energetic than explosive-energetic, because the fuel can’t efficiently mix, which should be within the tolerances of the upper stage.
Planes don’t need escape systems, and hopefully Starship can get into at least 5 nines of reliability, preferably more. It’s never going to be entirely safe (planes have an accident rate around 1 per million flights, not many of which are fatal), but there’s no reason to think that we couldn’t get to that safety level in time.
Megagermans vs milligermans