The operating system may be losing its luster. In fact, you could argue that the operating system–Linux, OS X and Windows–will become an application that just happens to boot first. And hardware vendors are on to the OS’s diminishing importance.

He goes on to say:

My working theory: The OS is being slowly downplayed as hardware vendors and Web developers grab more control over the user experience. The OS will never be totally irrelevant, but it will be increasingly less important. It’ll be plumbing. Simply put, the OS is being squeezed between hardware vendors that are cooking up their own applications to handle key tasks and the so-called Webtop, which will deliver programs through the browser.

I actually agree with much of what Larry says, even though I think the title and some of the points are too broad. Is the OS going away if people primarily use applications via a browser? Absolutely not. The OS remains: it’s only people’s legacy understanding of what an OS is that goes away. For instance, to my generation of computer users our experience with a computer was an experience with the OS. It was Windows, it was DOS, it was Apple’s, it was Linux. To my niece’s generation (age 14), their experience (except with gaming) is defined increasingly by the browser. Or by their cell phone.

As the traditional experience of the OS becomes less important, the value of a bloated OS with an incumbent advantage becomes less important. I have used both Linux and Windows and honestly when it comes to getting my work done, I find very little differences. Why? Because I use hosted applications via a browser. I use Word Press, Flickr, Google Apps, Gmail, online money management, online banking and so on. I don’t use native applications. The performance and experience of Linux in that case, is quite superior since it loads faster, performs better and gives me more flexibility. (It also doesn’t come pre-loaded with tons of crap-ware from AOL, security vendors and the like.)

Just because the OS becomes less visible, does that mean the OS goes away? How can it when software still needs to control hardware. You still need a kernel, you still need a scheduler. You can’t virtualize thin air. Plumbing is vitally important. (Just visit a third world country without it. Sanitation is the backbone of civilization.)

Is there a shift in the important of features required in an OS? Yes — see my points above. If the OS role has changed, I’m not so willing to pay the monopoly premium for Windows if native apps aren’t quite as important. (See the rise of the eeePC.) The ability for an OS to be flexible, to be customized by hardware vendors, by niche vendors who want to customize an OS for a specific audience: all of this becomes much more important. And all of this points to Linux. Desktops themselves are changing. They are becoming more like smart phones (or simply becoming phones). Those vendors want a customizable, modular OS they can brand with their own brand and not have to pay for the privilege to do so. This is why you are seeing the increase in Linux across mini-pcs, phones and embedded computing.

It’s funny to hear about the end of the OS when in fact, an OS or a component of it, like the Linux kernel, is in more and more places: it’s in your LCD TV, it’s in your car, it’s in your Tivo, it’s in your wristwatch. For something that is about to die, it sure is thriving.

There is a shift going on. There is a migration of margin in software sales, there is a migration of user attention from the OS to what you can do with the OS. But don’t forget there has to be an OS running all those apps people are accessing through a browser. See my list above — Google, Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Facebook — all running Linux. In the history of evolution, those species most adaptable survive and thrive.

The summit’s first panel yesterday, a State of Linux Roundtable, was made up entirely of Linux kernel hackers. During the Q&A session that followed, a gentleman from Nortel introduced himself and told the panel that Nortel was running Linux on one of its switches, and it worked just fine, but the company had to make a number of patches to the kernel to get it to work. He wondered how Nortel could get its patches into the mainstream kernel.

While I was pleased the kernel panel helped him with his request, I know that approach doesn’t scale. Not every developer can attend our Summits face-to-face after all. This wasn’t the first time I had heard this call for help: in Japan, in Korea, in Taiwan, in the US and elsewhere, I frequently am asked: “How do I participate in the Linux community? What can I do to increase my chances for inclusion in mainline?”

This illustrates that for an open and thriving community, the kernel development process can still be daunting for many new participants, even highly technical and sophisticated ones. Although participation in Linux is growing steadily (over 1,000 developers from over 100 companies per kernel release) I knew we could do better.

So over beers that night, Jon Corbet, executive editor of LWN.net, and I sketched out a plan to change this. The result is a 30-page guide on exactly how to participate in the Linux kernel community. I think this material is a first of a kind and of the highest quality, not surprising since Jon wrote it. Jon is not only the Linux “chief meteorologist” he’s also its “Emily Post.” (Sorry Jon!) In this guide, he has chronicled exactly how the kernel development process works, why companies and developers would benefit from mainlining their code and common pitfalls along the way.

Why is this important to release now? As Linux use expands to new areas like mobile and sub-notebooks, it’s even more important to reach out to these new participants and make it as easy as possible to participate. The strength of Linux is its community. With this guide and the other help we can provide (like our Summits) we hope to encourage even more individuals and companies to participate. Please let me or Jon know if you have feedback on this work, or better yet, leave a comment on the LDN.

Dechert and a couple of colleagues founded the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit group dedicated to delivering “trustable and open voting systems.” In addition to lobbying against proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years working with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting machine of their own.

Probably many of you have heard of the Diebold voting machines that were designed for use in elections in this country. They are closed and proprietary systems, and because of that, have serious security vulnerabilities that could result in election tampering. Besides security risks (as if there needs to be anything else), these closed systems are also extremely expensive, and just like with proprietary software, are designed to lock you in. Once election officials start using these machines they are beholden to that vendor unless they decide to phase them out. Because they are closed and opaque, no one but the vendors can work on the machines. Take in contrast, these new Linux-based machines:

At a price of about $400, the new voting machine is a tenth of the cost of proprietary machines - less if made in quantity, Dechert said - because it’s simply designed and based on free software. Its workings are transparent, he said, unlike some of the electronic voting machines that California decertified for security problems.

What would you rather your government spend your tax money on?

These Linux machines started me thinking about the ideals behind Linux (and open source) and how they could be put to work within the workings of government. The ideals I’m referring to are its process: transparency, accountability and meritocracy based on contributions. Last year I was quoted in an article about Open Legislation. What if our government officials drafted laws on a wiki (like the one powering Wikipedia or the Linux Foundation site). There you could see who actually wrote pieces of the legislation. You could see that a lobbyist from Chevron actually drafted part of the energy bill and then track that your representative “signed off” and then voted for it.
Or as Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, said in Open Legislation article:

“Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments,” Leyden said. “The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it’s not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki.”

The next likely step would be opening up the process further so that citizens could view and comment upon legislation in the works, or even — along the lines of California state Senator Joe Simitian’s concept in his “There Oughta Be a Law” contest — submit their own ideas, Leyden added.

We have the tools now for collaborative development: this has been proven in software and editorial content. Now let’s see if we can prove it with legislation. Collaborative, transparent development produces better software (and better voting machines). I think it can also produce better government.

Adding a community manager for the Linux Developer Network is an  important move for us. The LDN, while not launched yet, we hope will become a central place for the community to collaborate. As Brian mentions in this excellent article in OSstatic, the LDN will be the public-facing manifestation of all things LSB, meaning it will assist developers in writing portable applications for Linux.

But that’s certainly not all it will be. We want to make it easier for application developers to target Linux in general. We have designed the LDN  to hopefully provide a central place for collaboration and problem solving across the application development community. We also hope that other Linux loving folks may join the conversation on the site. This could evolve to include driver development, embedded, mobile, Cloud computing, general Linux documentation and so on. It’s a community site, and just like Linux, its direction will be set by those who use and participate in it.

As you can see from Brian’s response on OSstatic he holds a passion and vision for LDN:

How many thousands of developers work with free and open source software? And how much excellent documentation is out there now? I look at the efforts of the volunteers on JustLinux, or Jeremy Garcia and his team on LinuxQuestions, and I think just the answers they provide end-users are great. Now imagine the same energy from volunteers for developer-oriented content, all channeling their efforts into a centralized LDN site.

Watch this space for the launch of the LDN in the coming months. We expect great things from Brian in his new role.

Andrew Morton was on hand to speak about the status and direction of kernel development, covering kernel process material and specifically highlighting areas that need to be worked on including solid state disks and the linux-next tree.

James Morris presented on the SE Linux project, Thomas Gleixner spoke about the advantages of the Completely Fair Scheduler and Paul Moore talked about labeled networking.  Toshiharu Harada,project manager of TOMOYO Linux, was  able to explain to the developers in attendance about how to participate in Linux development and provided words of encouragement to other young developers like himself.

While the majority of the audience came from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia.  The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University.  An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.

Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan - something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to.

For more information on the 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, please visit the following:

All speaker slides posted on LF Japan’s website: http://www.linux-foundation.jp/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=10

James Morris’ notes, photos and slides: http://james-morris.livejournal.com/31240.html

Just last year I would have leaped out of my chair (spilling my drink) and shouted to uninterested cafe neighbors, “Hey, look! The New York Times is writing about Linux on the desktop!” I’m used to reading about Linux in server applications. The New York Stock Exchange for instance. But until recently, Linux on the desktop was relegated to the technologist’s ghetto. If you didn’t love the command line and compiling your own code, you would never have even tried it. Lucky for them, it’s becoming so common that I just nodded, pleased with the advancement of Linux in this new realm and went forward with my evening. (I should point out however that most of those uninterested neighbors sat rapt behind Apple notebooks. Still a long way to go.)

Today, more news on the Linux mini-top front. PC World writes that “Acer sees Linux as key to Low-cost laptops.”

“We really need to continue our journey on Linux,” said Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president at Acer, in an interview. “We can develop it more and we will try to develop alliances with more partners. Linux is a lonely word. We need to try to create a community,” he added.

Linux is a lonely word? Didn’t we just publish a paper that showed that over 1,000 different developers contributed to the last kernel release? Hardly a lonely place. (If you really want lots of room there are a few other open source OS projects you could try.)

All kidding aside, I think Mr. Wong is correct. He means for vendors shipping Linux on their desktop it is a lonely place. There isn’t the Microsoft ecosystem. There isn’t the partner programs. It’s a different model. Luckily for everyone, that desktop vendor community is getting more crowded and more mature. We are trying our small part by enabling a meeting of the key desktop vendors and architects at our Linux Foundation Collaboration Summits. I’d like us to do more.

Why is Linux on these new classes of PCs seeing some success? Microsoft has created a whole new class of “Vista Orphans:” vendors who want to sell lower cost PCs and can’t afford the component costs required by Vista. Microsoft has responded by keeping “Coke Classic” around (Windows XP) as they see their market presence slipping in these new machines. And that’s really the key. As Glyn Moody says: “The price difference has been slight and there has always been the problem of learning new ways of working. The Asus Eee PC changes all that. Because the form factor is so different, people don’t seem to make direct comparisons with the desktop PC and so don’t expect the user experience to be the same.”

While those neighbors in the cafe sit behind Apple notebooks with all of those attendant expectations, a new form factor breaks the hold of those prejudices and preconceptions. It’s not really all about price of OS, since Microsoft can certainly — if pressured — drop the price on XP, New Coke or their next OS. As a community let’s focus on experience and making Linux on the desktop less lonely:

Acer is banking on Linux for a lot of its Aspire one sales. The mini-laptop only carries Linux right now, but a Windows XP version will be available by the time the laptop launches in early July, Wong said.

“But in our marketing, our main message to users is about Linux because the experience is more real, it is more vivid,” he said.

As I watched and/or listened it struck me how many communities within communities were represented at the Summit. When we created the event our mission was to bring members of the Linux ecosystem together who normally don’t collaborate enough, but who should. Developers tend to talk to developers, industry talks to industry, end users yell at their vendors, but often don’t get to talk to the “community.” So far it seems to have been moderately successful. [Sometimes I struggle writing about community since it can mean so many things to so many people. Just as Eskimos have a dozen different words for “snow,” we need more words to describe “community.”]

At the Summit, for instance, we had the kernel development community represented in full force by such people as James Bottomley, Jon Corbet and Arjan van den Ven (you can watch videos with all of them on the gallery). Then you had desktop communities such as  the Ubuntu project, OpenSuse, Gnome and KDE and the X.org project. All of the projects, while pieces of what most people consider “Linux”, have communities all to themselves. Then you have other projects, like Mozilla’s Firefox, represented at the Summit by Chris Blizzard. (His video is here.) Why was Chris there? Because the Mozilla community cares about the Linux community, since they are a significant user pool. He also was there to interact with the new Linux Mobile communities who attended in great numbers. They represent a different opportunity for Mozilla.

At the Summit, the most interesting panel discussion, for me, was on Linux mobile. If you didn’t attend and are interested in the future of Linux, you may want to watch this video. As Dan Kohn smartly says, soon the number of mobile devices shipping with Linux will dwarf all the desktops and servers in the market today. From Google’s Android to the LiMo Foundation to Intel’s Moblin, there is a fight going on and many different strategies to make use of Linux in the mobile space. For instance, Intel’s Moblin, as pointed out in the panel, is the most traditionally open and aligned with existing open source projects and development processes.

Why so many strategies? Why so many mobile communities? These are very hard problems to solve with the unique requirements of platforms, handsets and application developers. These projects are trying to address the fragmentation inherent in all. Security and user experience demands also make this a very interesting space to watch. The most crucial part to watch will be the momentum of the developer communities within and around their projects/platforms.

I generally think of the Summit as a collection of Linux ecosystem participants, but after looking at these videos, I realize there are communities within communities represented there. To find out more detail on workgroup meetings that took place at the Summit, you can find notes and slides here. I hope the videos are of use to people who couldn’t attend. Please let me know if you have suggestions.

I was happy to talk about this with Dennis because I think it’s an under-the-radar topic. Just the week before I had a reporter ask me how Linux is going to deal with the threat of cloud computing. The threat? I told her that virtually all of the major cloud computing initiatives (except Microsoft’s) are built on Linux. (There is a potential displacement there for Linux distribution vendors but that’s another topic.) Linux as a platform is the enabling backbone of software as a service and cloud computing.

Recently, Bernard Golden at CIO Magazine wrote a very interesting article on the “migration of margin” in the software industry. He say that in the future there will be no open source Bill Gates or Larry Ellisons, meaning there will be no open source billionaires. But that there will be plenty of billionaires built on the backs of open source. Namely they will be the founders of these software as a service companies like Google and Facebook today and similar companies tomorrow.

Is this a problem? (Well, some of my friends at software start ups may say yes, but not me since I work for a non-profit. ) Seriously, no, I don’t think so. As Matt Asay so adroitly says, open source eliminates the vendor lock in that created the enormous margins of the proprietary software world. It has eliminated the terrible inefficiencies created by companies competing and trying to differentiate on platform components that should be commodities. Now they collaborate, as they do with Linux. So just as the margin has migrated, I would say so has the development burden. Just as we use pooled money in the form of taxes to create roads or airports, you want to share the development costs of your computing infrastructure, in this case the operating system. Open source makes starting a software company so much easier today.

Do you think Google could have built their business without Linux? I believe there has been more wealth created via Linux at Google than anywhere else. At the beginning, they could add 10,000 $1,000 no name servers at a time as they grew instead of needing a half million dollar investment. When you’re starting out, this is crucial. Open source is the enabler of these new companies’ innovation since it allows you to grow incrementally when you’re still trying to figure out your business

Google, Paypal, Amazon and others were able to build a mesh of low cost Linux servers from the lowest priced vendors. I’ve worked at software start ups before Linux and the cost of building out at the data center with expensive Sun hardware and software (back before the .com bust) made the cost of entry so high, very few companies could innovate and build the products they wanted to build without burning through millions of dollars. Then you had to go pay a lot of expensive sales people to sell it.

If Amazon had to pay a large amount of money for the foundational components of EC2, they couldn’t make it make sense economically for these small developers. The cost would be so high only very well funded companies could afford to use it. (Here I question just how much margin has migrated to something like Amazon’s EC2 network as the costs are pretty low.) Open source brings that barrier to entry so low we are seeing a burst of innovation. But the question remains: do people see this as a “free rider” problem where companies build wealth from free software without giving enough back?

Open source (especially platform software like Linux) is used in more and more companies, in more and more uses. Check out the Linux Kernel Development paper to see a long list. Because it’s open source you have a multitude of companies tied to the product and its success. In the Linux world, the platform is used by companies in the desktop, server and embedded markets. A member of the Linux community is not tied into one company since his or her skills or transferable to all of the companies who use Linux. This is in contrast to jobs in the proprietary worlds. If you’re a Zune developer, you certainly have transferable software development skills to another similar project. (Languages are languages after all.) Yet the value of your specialized knowledge and experience is of much more use to Microsoft than anyone else. That means you, as a worker, have less leverage and are more at the mercy of internal project politics specific to that company. (Unfortunately it shouldn’t work this way, but we all know that companies are generally not quick to reward good employees unless someone else may take them.)

Open source projects are not immune to politics, don’t get me wrong, but there is one key difference: transparency. Because your work is in the open, it’s the best way to market your skills. Esther Shindler, editor at CIO Magazine, has a great article on this topic. She says:

Sometimes, there isn’t much you can do to kick-start your career. Not everyone can be lucky enough to get involved in a high-profile project at work, or to develop a talent in a technology that’s suddenly in-demand. But it surprises me when IT professionals who aim to move up the career ladders don’t take advantage of one resource that’s a win-win solution all around: get involved in an open source project.

This is particularly important to women in IT, who can feel that it’s hard to get noticed in their companies (see The Executive Woman’s Guide to Self-Promotion for general guidelines on how to counter that problem). But it really applies to anyone who wants to gain experience and visibility in the IT department, even if you don’t care about becoming a rock star.

As a participant in an open source project, everything is in your control. You pick the project that you think is the most valuable, or in which you can develop the skills you need but can’t justify on your résumé. In the universe of open source, you’re judged only by what you contribute. Corporate politics aren’t an issue. If your code is useful, or your technical documentation is appreciated, or you’re just a welcoming voice on the community IRC channel, you have a good chance of being invited to become a committer.

I think there is a shortage of great open source developers. Women, especially, should see this as a great opportunity for their career and get involved with Linux or other open source.

• The largest workgroup gathering at the Summit was the Desktop Architects meeting. One third of the attendees (if not slightly more) were members of the desktop community from such projects, companies and communities as Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, Novell’s desktop group, OEM vendors selling Linux desktops such as Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, gOS, Everek, Zonbu, Xandros and many more. You can check out the detailed agenda here or John’s write up here.
• The Linux Foundation paid for a good percentage of these community leaders to attend our Summit, at our cost.
• We reserved the largest facilities at the Summit for the Desktop group. Second largest? Mobile.
• I added a desktop panel on the first day of the Summit that featured all of the leading Desktop OEM vendors. This is the only time these people have been featured on one stage. Why did I add this session this year? Because the story of the Linux desktop is so compelling, especially on ultra-mobiles. We allowed those OEM providers a place to showcase their products and stories to a wide audience, including press and analysts.
• Joe’s right. Many sessions, including the one Joe sat in on, were not focused on desktop. They were focused on broader issues facing Linux that affect all users of Linux: desktop, server and mobile. These topics include power management, driver backporting, driver support, printing. The great thing about Linux is that improvements in power management on your laptop help server users save money in the data center. And also help embedded/mobile manufacturers in a device. Linux isn’t silo-ed in its technology. We shouldn’t be in the way we talk about these conferences.

All that said, I will give no guarantees that next year’s Summit will have the same level of support and attention for the desktop. Why? Because this is a member and community driven organization; the workgroups and meetings that take place in our forum are largely driven from its members (both industry and developer). (But if you asked me to place a bet I would certainly place a large wager that next year’s desktop track will be just as strong as this years.) This year there is a lot of interest and passion around the desktop and mobile devices; so not surprisingly it received so much attention. This year a driver back porting workgroup met to discuss the state of drivers (both in server and desktop worlds.) Will they meet next year? It’s up to them. Maybe it will be a Real Time Linux group. Maybe it will be file systems. Maybe it will be women in open source. Who knows. That’s the beauty of it. The Gnome Mobile group requested meeting space. Are those individuals corporate members of the Linux Foundation? No, but we realize it’s important for the platform. We made it happen and paid travel for some of their participants. Same with the Virtualization Mini Summit.

Our Summits are by design small and intimate. They are summits, not conferences, which means that leaders from various community groups are the intended audiences. They are working meetings: not intended for thousands of Linux desktop users (or server users for that matter). They are free events and thus must be bounded by size and cost considerations. Should there be a huge Linux desktop event for end users of all types? Perhaps. I am open to hearing ideas and if the LF can play a meaningful role. This is a culture of participation after all. You can leave comments or email directly to share ideas. Maybe we can help.

I am flattered that Joe attended our summit and that his article has generated a strong reaction among the community of users. For a good understanding of what the Summit is all about, I point you to another article. This one (also by a reporter named Joe Barr) says:

The gentleman’s question and the answers he received illustrate the value of the summit. A highly technical user, but one obviously unfamiliar with the customs and process of Linux kernel development, was able to ask exactly the right people how to achieve the desired result. Collaboration, participating in the process, was the answer he needed.

The summit continues through tomorrow, bringing business people and kernel hackers face to face, allowing each to learn more about the wants, needs, and desires of the other, and helping both parties work together more productively.