While I agree with everything you said to a certain extent, I agree less that their expertise makes them uniquely qualified to engineer the flight software for

While I agree with everything you said to a certain extent, I agree less that their expertise makes them uniquely qualified to engineer the flight software for the prototype helicopter on Mars. It is quite a different environment, but there is certainly plenty of crossover. I think JPL has enough expertise in this domain, though. But yes, it's a wonderful thing that a fairly-accessible linux distribution is powering space missions in this era. It's long overdue, I think, and many of the JPL folks would probably agree.