The State of the Internet Operating System

macslocum writes "Tim O'Reilly: 'I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system," but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize.'"

Comments

Meh

[WrongSizeGlass]

That article isn't exactly cromulent. Is there a daily prize for obviousness?

Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[elrous0]

This whole "Internet OS" thing reminds me of the periodic resurgences of the dumb terminal/thin client idea that goes back to the mainframe days. It seems like every ten years or so, everyone is talking about thin clients in every office, with the OS and apps running on some offsite server somewhere (now with the added twist of multiple servers over the internet). Ostensibly this is seen as a good way to save IT money and overhead. But in every actual deployment I've seen, it only causes hassles, additional expense, and headaches.

Back in the 90's we tried this at my old university. We networked all our computers and put all our apps on a central server. Even though this was all done on a local network (much more reliable in those days than the internet), it was still a complete disaster. Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document. Now, with little network downtime, you would think this wouldn't be so much of a problem--but when you're talking about thousands of people who live and die by the written word, and who are often working on class deadlines, you can imagine that even 30 minutes of downtime was a nightmare. I was skeptical of this system from the get-go, but got overruled by some "visionaries" who had bought into the whole thin client argument with a religious fervor. Of course, long story short, we ended up scrapping the system after a year and going back to the old system (with a significant cost to the state and university for our folly).

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[Em Emalb]

Actually, it's all just one big cycle. When I first broke into the IT world, PCs were a bit of a novelty in most businesses. Then, the PC explosion caused things to move towards a "client-side" setup, with faster desktops, laptops and not as much horse power required on the server side. Then, in an effort to save money, tied in with servers/CPUs/memory becoming cheaper, and security concerns, companies started (or have started) to slowly pull things back from the client side and put more emphasis on the server side of things.

That said, I'm sure it won't be long before we go full-circle again.

One final thought, I do not want any "OS" that's supposed to run on my computer to be running on the internet. Corporate networks, in my experience, are typically much more prone to solid uptimes, unlike the internet. Plus, if something goes down on my network, I don't have to depend on someone else to fix it.

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[oldspewey]

Exactly - keep your CPU busy running SETI@Home while all your apps sit on a server somewhere.

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[drinkypoo]

It's also dumb. Even if you bought a low-end Intel Atom machine, why would you want to waste that CPU letting it be a dumb terminal? Put that CPU to work by enabling it to do tasks independently even if the network connection fails.

I weep for OpenMOSIX. I was hoping that the project would continue and ere long we'd be motivated to buy all one architecture in our house simply because all the machines would form a cluster almost without our involvement and just accelerate each others' tasks. A terminal cluster where the terminals also make the entire system faster is kind of an ideal dream.

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[jc42]

... but how often does slashdot go down these days?

Actually, that's a good way to phrase it. That is, it may be true that slashdot itself is almost always up and running. But from my viewpoint, out here on an internet "leaf" node, slashdot quite often seems to be "down". It's fairly common that when I do a refresh, it can take a minute or more to complete. Sometimes when the "Done" appears at the bottom left of the window, the window is mostly blank, and it takes another refresh to get the summaries back on the screen.

The basic problem with the cloud-computing model is the same as with the thin-client+server model and the terminal-cluster+mainframe model: Your computing is done on one or more remote machines, over which you have no control, and even when that's working, the results you see on your screen depends on a comm network. That network might work well when first installed with short links. But if it's successful, it'll quickly become overloaded and upgraded at team of managers and workers who mostly don't have a clue about how the technical details of the system.

The bean counters can explain all they like about how much cheaper centrally-controlled computing systems are. But if you actually want to get your work done, you'll once again discover that you need a computer that can do the work locally. If you don't have control over the machine, it won't do your work the way you want it done, and the people who do control it won't have a strong motive to help you with problems that they don't see or understand.

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[david.given]

I weep for OpenMOSIX. I was hoping that the project would continue and ere long we'd be motivated to buy all one architecture in our house simply because all the machines would form a cluster almost without our involvement and just accelerate each others' tasks. A terminal cluster where the terminals also make the entire system faster is kind of an ideal dream.

What happened to OpenMOSIX, anyway? I used it very successfully to turn groups of workstations into build servers; they all ran OpenMOSIX, and then make -j8 on any of the workstations would farm out the build to all the workstations. And it all Just Worked, and there was bugger all maintenance involved, etc. I was really looking forward to it getting mainlined into the kernel and then it just all kind of vanished.

There's no indication of what happened on the mailing list --- it just stops. There's a new project called LinuxPMI that claims to be a continuation but there's no mailing list traffic...

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[Drethon]

Where I'm at on the other hand I almost never have delay loading a slashdot page. Look at where the internet is now compared to where it was ten years ago. We have an explosion of broadband access compared to back then. If the internet continues growing that may no longer be a problem in ten years.

On the other hand an internet OS will use a lot of that bandwidth, likely leading to increased lag even as bandwidth increases (see hardware requirements of Win 95 vs Win 7...).

Unfortunately the only sure way to know how well it will work or not is to try it and see what happens. Then if it doesn't, see what fails and if it can be improved. The internet OS has enough potential to make it worth it but yes it has as many potential downfalls...

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[snarfies]

According to Wikipedia, "On July 15, 2007, Bar announced that the openMOSIX project would reach its end of life on March 1, 2008, due to the decreasing need for SSI clustering as low-cost multi-core processors increase in availability."

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[Tubal-Cain]

Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document.

Meh. That's true for my workplace despite our thick clients. Network folders, Internet connection, Active Directory... If anything goes down the office just sort of grinds to a halt.

P or NP

[daveime]

It seems the hardest and most time-consuming problem with Internet operating systems is figuring out how to work offline.

And the easiest solution, which seems to escape almost everybody, is "don't work online in the first place".

Re:P or NP

[starfishsystems]

Not really. Your situation of working offline is a particular case of working online. It just happens to have high latency. So the easiest solution, for the user, is one which generalizes to encompass high latency.

The converse is not true. Of course you can retain the capabilities of an offline environment even after you add a wire to it, but those capabilities do not generalize to managing the resources on the other end of the wire.

The easiest solution to implement is a pencil and a piece of paper. Oh, you want capabilities too? Well, that's different.

Re:P or NP

[Late Adopter]

And the easiest solution, which seems to escape almost everybody, is "don't work offline in the first place".

FTFY. Having my data available on any online computer or device that I happen to be at *increases* its availability to me, even in the presence of occasional outages. There's down-sides, such as privacy, but availability isn't one of them: it's a net positive.

Internet as a living entity

[gmuslera]

If were a living thing, it would have cancer, several kinds of it, spread all around the body. Botnets, zombies armies, spam, malware sites... a good percent of it is just badly sick. It have several brains too, some of them playing against the health of the whole body by not letting the "blood" flow freely all around, as some governments censoring it because political reasons or lobbying ones.

It have its strengths too, is maturing (hopely), have a good defense system so the sickness spread around don't infect everything, and it evolves fast (even if limited by laws, patents, trolls, etc), getting more personal and localized.

With a bit of luck people, institutions and governments starts to worry about its health, the ecosystem that it is and start working on preserving it as much as the planet we live.

He's chanelling Stallman is why it sounds familar

[xzvf]

O'rielly is pointing out the same dangers of the Cloud as Stallman, but in a reasonable voice. The question is how to preserve the DIY environment when hardware is sealed (see iPad) and software is ran on corporate computers. Will innovation be constrained or will the cloud be open enough to allow people to change vendors easily without total reworks?

Re:He's chanelling Stallman is why it sounds famil

[tadghin]

You've got to be kidding that I'm channelling Stallman. He's finally waking up to an issue that I put in front of him all the way back in 1999. At the time, he said "It didn't matter." See for yourself, in the transcript of our interchange at the 1999 Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. They are a fair way through the PDF of the transcript, so read on down: http://tim.oreilly.com/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf

At the time I was talking about "infoware" rather than "Web 2.0" but the concepts I was working with were in the same direction.

But in case you don't want to go through all that, here's the relevant bit:

Richard Stallman:

I came up to the mike again because I wanted to address
the topic that Tim O'Reilly raised. Some of you might know about our major
disagreements on other issues, but that's not what he spoke about. And I think that
this distinction between hardware and software and infoware is an interesting one
and that you addressed it very well from the open source point of view. That being
a matter of looking for a development methodology of making things that work and
judging success to a large extent in the same concept of market share or number of
users that is used as a criterion by the proprietary software developers. Now,
looking at that same concept, that same situation from the Free Software point of
view, I bring to this a different idea of goals and a different idea of a criterion.
The goal in the Free Software movement is to extend our freedom. 'Ours' meaning
that of whoever wants freedom to work together so that freedom spreads over a
wider range of activities. And so our criterion isn't really about market share, ever
and it's only secondarily about 'Do we have good technology, does the program
work reliably?' Obviously if it works badly enough it won't be useful, but otherwise
we can fix it, so that's just a side issue. The important thing is: How many activities
can we do without giving up our freedom? What is the range of things that we can
do on a computer which has just free software on it, where we don't have to
compromise our freedom to do any of those things?

Now when you apply this criterion to things like web servers that answer certain
kinds of questions for you, that communicate with you, you find an interesting
thing: a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits
his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't
have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software
versus proprietary arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and
run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we
allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed
to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is
running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy
the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that
program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position, the way I
would be if I were supposed to have a program on my computer and the law says I
can't give you a copy when you come visit me. That really puts me on the spot
morally. If a proprietary program is on Amazon's computer, that's Amazon's
conscience. Now I would like them to have freedom too. I hope they will want
freedom, and they will work with me so that we all get freedom, but it's not directly
an attack on you and me if Amazon has a proprietary program on their computer.
It's not crucially important to you and me whether Amazon uses a free operating
system like GNU plus Linux, or a free web server like Apache. I mean I hope they
will, I hope free software will be popular, but if they give up their freedom, that's
just a shame it's not a danger to us who want free