The Linux kernel is famous for trying really hard to maintain ABI backwards-compatibility. In practice this means that statically-linked executables from a dec

The Linux kernel is famous for trying really hard to maintain ABI backwards-compatibility. In practice this means that statically-linked executables from a decade ago will run just fine on Linux today, at least as far as interactions with the kernel is concerned (interactions with other parts of the system, it depends). The same is not necessarily true of dynamically-linked applications because user-space libraries' maintainers are not as exacting about backwards-compatibility. Note that this is not an argument for static linking, at least not in its current form.