The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate