An "online desktop" for GNOME?

An "online desktop" is not exactly a new idea, as X-based thin clients have been around for twenty years or more, but combining the desktop and the web is an idea that is gaining some momentum, at least in the GNOME community. The online-desktop project is an attempt to define a mashup of Linux, GNOME and web applications into something completely new. It is an ambitious goal, which will be met with a fair amount of skepticism, likely by all of the communities being mashed.

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In a keynote at the recent GUADEC 2007 conference, Bryan Clark and Havoc Pennington laid out a vision (slides in PDF format) of the online-desktop (OD) with the following top-level description:

Many people are or will be using online applications almost exclusively, with the operating system just providing a platform to run the browser, at least according to Pennington and Clark.

The OD would seamlessly connect the browser-based applications with any native programs that remain, storing data locally and remotely. This would allow users to access their data, including settings and preferences, from any internet connected device. A user would be able to jump between multiple computers and mobile devices, finding their entire desktop environment and data available on each. A new disk and fresh install would no longer require a tedious reconfiguration of preferences and restoration of backups, a user would simply log in to the 'service' and pick them all up.

This network-centric view of computer usage is not particularly new either - Sun's "the network is the computer" initiative is a famous (or infamous) example. The keynote points to plans for the next version of Windows, which will be more closely integrated with Microsoft's internet services, as an indicator that the OD direction is the right one. In order for Microsoft to play its usual lock-in game, it would need to provide most or all of the kinds of web applications that people already use. OD proposes to integrate with the existing applications, presenting a single view that incorporates them and facilitates sharing between them, without the lock-in.

The requisite demo during the keynote was of Big Board, a GNOME Python application, that prototypes portions of the OD, using the Mugshot project. A high-level implementation plan was also presented:

    SEARCH AND DESTROY everything that leaves my data stranded
    on a single computer.

    INTEGRATE the best web applications with the desktop.

    RETHINK the user experience to take advantage of live 
    connections to friends on the net.

    CHANGE THE DEFAULTS so naïve users taking no special action
    will create collaborative, backed-up, online data rather than local
    files.

By its very nature, OD has a very distributed architecture. It is meant to talk to various servers to store data using the services (Flickr, Picasa, Gmail, etc.) that the user is already using. But there will also be data that needs to be stored, for instance preferences and configuration information, for which a service will need to be created. This service is envisioned to be decentralized, with at least some of the servers run by the community. Like many parts of the project, it is still in the planning stages.

The project is young, with thoughts and discussion starting to pop up on the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list in April. Since the conference, things have started to heat up, the website has moved from within Mugshot to its own site, some mockups have been created and there has been a bit of a discussion about an acronym. An obvious choice, using the first letters of GNOME Online Desktop leaves something to be desired, so current candidates seem to be GOLD (OnLine Desktop) or GOOD (Open Online Desktop). Others would rather see it referred to as GNOME Online without an acronym; we stayed out of it and used OD.

Another piece that is in the planning stages is an API for desktop applications to be able to share HTTP state and cache information. With multiple programs talking to some of the same websites, cookies, at least, will need to be shared between them. Sharing data that has been cached from websites, between the browser and other programs that use it, would be useful to reduce traffic as well.

Mixing and matching different web application APIs and storing lots of personal data on remote servers will require careful thought about security. There is some mention of "strong cryptography" being used, but the concerns mentioned so far seem mostly concerned about handling (and losing) private keys. Overall, the security issue seems to be a low priority. A post to Pennington's blog seems to miss the point, comparing the OD security issues to that of online banking. Banks only store the information they have, not the sum total of all data one might have on their computer. In order to fulfill the "secure and virus-free" portion of the goal statement, a lot more thinking and effort will have to be focused there.

Folks typically carry more powerful computers, with more storage, in their pockets today, than were even available to home users twenty years ago. That trend seems to be continuing, at least for now, so there should be ways to carry our own data with us. Desktops that were set up to handle external, plugged-in storage devices and easily switch to an environment stored there would remove the need to store that data on an internet server, except, perhaps, for backups. This might be a simpler alternative that removes some of the concern about loss of data control.

There are lots of opportunities to share and collaborate using web applications, for pictures, text, video, music, etc. But there is also lots of data folks may not want to share. Financial information, email, contracts and work-related documents are just a few of the things that people very well might want to keep private, naïve or no. It will be very difficult to set up an environment that turns all data, by default, into "collaborative, backed-up, online data", without sometimes exposing sensitive data. Using the word processing tool to type a blog entry and a love letter should not automatically expose both to the world.

An interesting, related development is an attempt to define what a "free" or "open" web service is. If a user's personal data is to be stored somewhere other than the local disk, potentially multiple places, it must be clear what rights the user has to that data. The responsibilities of the service must be clearly defined as well. Luis Villa has some thoughts about the framework in which an Open Service Definition might come about.

The framework consists of sets of goals, preconditions and rights, each of which can be thought of as a "sliding scale". He goes into some detail enumerating each of the sets and discussing various settings that could be made on the scales and the impacts that has on freedom and openness, for both users and providers. By using OD as a test case while discussing various settings with interested parties, Villa hopes to come out with a set of definitions and licenses that, in many ways, parallel the Free Software and Open Source definitions. It is an issue that is much larger than the OD project and one that bears watching.

The biggest question, perhaps, is whether this is the "right" direction for GNOME and for desktops in general. Is personal computing finally headed toward a completely network-centric existence? If so, are HTTP, HTML, Javascript, AJAX, and the like up to the task? One is reminded of the wisdom of the Magic 8-ball: Answer hazy, ask again later. One advantage that free software has over some of its competitors is its diversity; we are certain to see other implementations of an online desktop (Pyro for example) as well as desktops that resist the close integration to the web. Free software will truly give users the ability to choose the one that works for them; users of proprietary systems may not be so lucky.