Mru

What it is

No software system in human history has been designed to operate for centuries without human intervention. The longest-lived systems we have built — deep-space probes approaching fifty years of service, banking codebases approaching sixty — survive only through continuous human maintenance.

Mru is an open-source operating system that treats this physical decay not as an exceptional fault but as the governing design constraint — the Degradation-First Principle. From it follows a layered architecture modeled on biological robustness: a minimal, formally verified interpreter, replicated across reconfigurable hardware, executing behavior encoded as mutable data — the way DNA encodes behavior run by a replicated molecular interpreter.

Designing software to outlive its makers is not speculation but a tractable engineering discipline — one the interstellar case makes unavoidable, and a growing class of terrestrial systems increasingly needs.