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The Operating System is Disappearing

2007-11-09
by Olivier Cleynen

I believe the free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ty is at risk of miss­ing a large step in the evo­lu­tion of soft­ware: the dis­ap­pear­ance of the OS (oper­at­ing sys­tem). I cur­rent­ly express this idea in a series of con­fer­ences around Europe and thought a writ­ten arti­cle would be a good complement.

We’re so very 1999

Typ­i­cal­ly, a com­put­er instal­la­tion will look just as below.

Computer Outline in 2000

All at the bot­tom is the com­mon user, Joe, who uses his com­put­er with some kind of inter­face (screen, key­board, mouse). The mid­dle box is the hard­ware, which is con­nect­ed to a remote Inter­net (top).
The soft­ware sits between the inter­face and the hard­ware. This is what we are good at doing. The Lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem is prob­a­bly the most remark­able way for Joe to do things with his hard­ware. From office work to 3D ani­ma­tion, through graph­ic design and web surf­ing, there prob­a­bly isn’t much that free soft­ware can’t do. It has tak­en years of work for us to get there, and we right­ly take pride in the result.

The prob­lem is, this is how things were in 1999. The soft­ware world has changed — and if you’re a Gmail or Flickr enthu­si­ast, you may have a hint already.

A new picture for software

In 2007 Joe is still here, but this time the pic­ture is a lot more unclear:

Outline of a computer in 2007

The most strik­ing dif­fer­ence is that the Inter­net, pre­vi­ous­ly a nice-to-have com­mod­i­ty, has into a giant, indis­pens­able ele­ment. Sec­ond, Joe does not sim­ply have one desk­top com­put­er, but owns or uses a vari­ety of net­worked devices.

And last­ly, Joe’s per­son­al files, in addi­tion to the movies he watch­es and the music he lis­tens to, are increas­ing­ly stored on remote inter­net servers.

Does your favorite Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tion sud­den­ly feel a lot small­er here? Let us look at the prob­lem a lit­tle closer.

Software everywhere

Software in every deviceThe rise of soft­ware all around our­selves in our con­sumer-fren­zy-dri­ven por­tion of the plan­et, is inex­orable. Soft­ware is con­ve­nient, it’s effi­cient: we throw it in every device around. TVs, phones, cars, music devices, GPS — they all have some, car­ry­ing ever more of our infor­ma­tion and culture.

So far, the tra­di­tion­al PC is the only of these where on will eas­i­ly find free soft­ware. For the free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ty, adapt­ing to this vari­ety of devices and hard­ware will require a lot of time, effort and sup­port.
This is, how­ev­er, the obsta­cle we will most eas­i­ly over­come. I trust the amaz­ing code-writ­ing and adap­tive abil­i­ties of the devel­op­ers out there. For exam­ple, the Fire­fox and Ubun­tu com­mu­ni­ties are already mak­ing efforts to adapt to “mobile plat­forms” with the first results like­ly being released in 2008.
It still remains that every time we use one of these devices, hid­den code and legal restric­tions are run­ning over our data.

Stylish terminals and streaming servers

Run­ning pieces of pro­pri­etary soft­ware inside every­thing you touch is not as scary as anoth­er trend we are wit­ness­ing: the surge of Inter­net-based services.

Computer terminalYears of soft­ware devel­op­ment work and indus­try stan­dard­iza­tion have made it pos­si­ble for free soft­ware to read just about any video cam­era you plug into your com­put­er. But typ­i­cal­ly now, with­in one minute, the file is uploaded to Youtube and dis­ap­pears into a serv­er black-box, to be streamed again in a pro­pri­etary pro­to­col every time the user wish­es to view it.
This is but one of many such occur­rences: the email pro­to­col is open and easy to imple­ment, but most of it is now done on pri­vate, high­ly con­ve­nient but ful­ly closed sys­tems (Gmail comes to mind). Pho­tos are uploaded to Flickr-like cen­trals where the man­age­ment, com­ment­ing, tag­ging, all hap­pens with­in pro­pri­etary sys­tems. There isn’t, in fact, any area –from account­ing to cal­en­dar­ing and social net­work­ing– where one can’t find a pop­u­lar web appli­ca­tion that does it in a sexy way — albeit all with pro­pri­etary software.

Are these ser­vices “eat­ing up” our soft­ware? What could be hap­pen­ing is that the con­tent of our com­put­ers is escap­ing from us. Our free-soft­ware-pow­ered PCs could become styl­ish dis­play devices, while the real soft­ware, the one deal­ing with our writ­ings, media, work and cul­ture, would be run on black-box remote servers. Styl­ish ter­mi­nals, and remote stream­ing com­put­ers: not much of an excit­ing prospect.

So

The oper­at­ing sys­tem is not dis­ap­pear­ing from a tech­ni­cal view­point –we will always use soft­ware to run the chips inside our machines. It remains, how­ev­er, that the most sen­si­tive parts of this soft­ware (the ones with which we access and cre­ate our cul­ture) are increas­ing­ly trans­fered online.

How exact­ly the free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ty should deal with it, is not obvi­ous. Per­haps won­der­ing and under­stand­ing what attracts so many of us to Gmail ((yours tru­ly is one ex gmail-user)) is the best way to start.

the next arti­cle is called it’s not the Inter­net any­more and looks more into the nature of our net­work usage.

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(more by Olivier: articles, thermodynamique, fluid mechanics, mécanique newtonienne)