Snowed In

Here are a few thoughts on where I think the free software desktop needs to go. Apologies to the non-geeks reading this. I’d love to write this up for a broader audience, but I don’t have time right now and I just wanted to get the ideas on paper.

GNOME, and most of the Free Software world is still very focused on offline computing. Everything’s an application that gets downloaded and run on our computers. But web-based software is taking over the world, for a handful of very good reasons:

1) It’s trivial to install
2) Someone else maintains it for the users (Google is responsible for keeping Google.com working, not me)
3) Your data is on a server somewhere, which means it’s safer and easier to access from multiple locations
4) It’s a lot easier to make software collaborative when it’s on a server somewhere

So instead of assuming that Free Software is on the desktop and that the web is just something we want to support, let’s start thinking of this a little differently. Let’s start thinking that all software is going to the web, and Free Software needs to adapt so that people will still have the Freedom that Free Software is all about when they ditch their old desktop software for their much more attractive web-based software.

This new way of thinking leads to two big ideas:

1) We need Free as in Freedom web infrastructure. That means organizations providing hosting and online software management in a way that users are guaranteed the freedom to run, change, and redistribute the software, and have complete control over their data and privacy.

2) The Free Desktop needs to move away from being an all-purpose desktop, and towards becoming a modern web bootstrapping environment. Instead of providing an interface between a user and their data, it needs to become a cradle for web use and a channel between the data locked in a user’s hardware and their web apps.

That means GNOME should be competing with Firefox. GNOME and Epiphany should become one, and the world of GNOME apps should be thinned and stripped down into browser components:

• EOG should become an interface for getting photos off your camera and onto flickr
• We need a simple video importer to feed into something like JumpCut.
• We need to pull web apps out into the GNOME interface. Gmail needs to be a 1st class citizen on the gnome destkop.
• We should provide hooks for web sites to integrate tightly with the desktop experience. So, instead of Tomboy, we’d have an applet that pulled a tomboy menu off the web, and opened chrome-less browser windows with Tomboy web pages.

This approach ignores a lot of stuff you can’t do well on the web yet: listening to music, watching movies, graphic design, heck… any computer-intensive profession. But the web is catching up. There’s no doubt in my mind that within a few years there will be music-listening web sites that give iTunes a run for it’s money. But for the time being we’ll still need downloadable applications to do that stuff.

There are a few other developments I think GNOME needs to get on. Search needs to be FRONT AND CENTER. Beagle/whatever needs to be the centerpiece of the interface. Undo/redo/revision control are basically the same as they were in 1970. We need a modern undo/redo architecture. But the web is the 900 lb gorilla in the room, and the desktop that adapts to it first will be the one leading the way into the future.