Rob Landley

My main projects right now are Toybox and mkroot (the successor to Aboriginal Linux), although I do some work on toolchains, kernel, qemu, and documentation too.

My modus operandi is to dig down through superfluous layers of complexity to create simple, flexible systems you can reproduce from scratch, port wherever you like, and built from a small enough amount of code you can understand what it's doing and audit it for security problems. Treat complexity is a cost, and try to get the best bang for the buck.

It's basically glorified janitorial work. Most people race towards the new frontier, I follow behind cleaning up the mess. My goal is to figure out how to reproduce the experts' black magic, then make it look so easy that being an expert in it no longer means anything.

These days, turning Android into a self-hosting development environment seems like the best path forward, for reasons explained in the above video. (There are literally a billion smartphones preinstalled with Android. Having a phone ought to be enough to let you program the phone, down to the deepest level.) Releasing new code under a license that places it into the public domain allows the most flexible and widespread use.