By Doc Searls
There used to be a dream we called distributed computing: It started with autonomous but fully interoperable computers, but its scope reached out to imagine intelligence everywhere and in everything — all connected and working together in useful, sensible ways.
This wasn't a consumer-world dream of clichés like talking toasters and refrigerators. It was a technologist's dream about Net-native-everything: industrial controls, lawn sprinklers, car radios, phone system switches, elevators, you name it.
It's still a dream. Of course, so was the Net, for a good decade or two before it exploded into ubiquity. Now we have this "new" economy with an e- prefix for every category and a .com suffix for every company. It's a new world. And it wouldn't be here if it weren't for the open source conditions that made it possible.
Now the second bang is about to go off. This is the one that threatens to reify the distributed computing dream. Not surprisingly, the founding conditions are the same.
At a fundamental level, we're seeing the explosion of Linux into the embedded world of special-purpose devices that rely on computation but are anything but computers. Also known as the real time world, it has been the near-exclusive province of proprietary operating systems designed especially for the arcane needs of real-time devices. It has also been a feudal frontier of highly separate product categories, serving highly separate markets, each with their own highly arcane conditions.
Now comes Linux. There are lots of reasons why Linux is an ideal embedded OS, and we'll go into those shortly. But the bottom line for ubiquitizing purposes is this: Linux works across applications, markets and categories, as well as across processors.
But Linux isn't the whole story. There are at least two other related developments involved: XML (Extensible Markup Language) and IM (Instant Messaging). They come together with Linux from very different angles. XML comes from leading-edge developers, working to get the Web's future unstuck from its static HTML conceptual mud. IM comes from great technologists too, but they're working with conceptual mud that one wag (yours truly) once called "fourteen year old girls cheating on their homework and talking about boys in real time." In other words, a client world thus far defined by AIM and ICQ, both from AOL.
All three of these subjects — lets call them EL, XML and IM — are huge. Google lists 114,999, 115,999 and 70,500 results for the three topics, respectively (on 22 June, 2000). Each has more than enough new material for its own magazine, much less one single issue of Linux Journal.
So we're just concentrating on the explosive convergence of all three, which is happening around the open source project that seems to do the most obvious job of bringing all three together. Jabber is XML-based Instant Messaging (and much more) that allows anybody to deploy its services the way they now deploy email and the Web: at any host they like.
What Jabber does with instant messaging, XML and embedded Linux adds huge new conversational territory to all three. Inside that territory is the distributed computing dream.
Maybe we're wrong, but we think this is where the Next Big Bang is going to happen. The last time we felt this way, "we" consisted of Phil Hughes, and the spot we watched was Linux. That was in 1994, when both Linux and Linux Journal were pre-1.0.
Look what's happened since. If we're right, this is even bigger.