Funny seeing this on HN. I worked at PolySat until 2010 (a year before that article was published), so I know most of those names. When I worked there, our avi

Funny seeing this on HN. I worked at PolySat until 2010 (a year before that article was published), so I know most of those names. When I worked there, our avionics was embedded C on bare metal. We had several problems we were trying to solve when we realized that switching to embedded Linux makes solving them easier. We wanted to abstract away from the hardware to be able to make more use of automated testing. Switching to Linux meant we didn't have to build our own HAL. For the algorithms I was working on, I wanted to do more of my development on a Linux system. And we saw it as a way to make on-orbit patches easier. I wasn't involved in making the transition to Linux though. That effort started around the time that my focus shifted to my master's thesis.