The Ballooning Platform

"My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite", Walt Whitman wrote. Today most of us have no idea what he was talking about. In Whitman's time, mortise and tenon were common expressions for the female and male members of joined wood structures. Today mortise and tenon are used only in certain kinds of furniture and in accurate reconstructions of historic buildings. For modern building construction, it's largely irrelevant.

The threshold of irrelevancy was crossed in 1833, when Augustine Taylor built St. Mary's church in Fort Dearborn, near Chicago. Using do-it-yourself carpenters, he built the 36 x 24 foot house for just $400, and in a very short time. He and his crew did it by framing the thing in 2 x 4s and 2 x 6s -- using studs, joists and cross members, all nailed together. There were no mortises, no tenons, no dovetail joints. Nothing carved about it. Just boards and nails.

Professional carpenters said it would blow away in a stiff wind, and labeled the technique "balloon construction", because the frame itself resembled a balloon to them. It was a derisive term, but it stuck.

<http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi779.htm>

Within a few years, balloon frame construction revolutionized pretty much everything for which it proved useful. It supported the explosive growth of cities, towns and suburbs. It allowed frontier towns to be built almost overnight. It lowered the threshold of business for all kinds of retailers. It informed the construction of high-rises, which applied the same principles to girders. It put many more workers in the lumber and construction business.

To fuel its growth, whole counties and mountains were denuded of pine and oak. (Making Paul Bunyan stories possible as well.)

And it obsoleted timber-based construction carpentry, much as cinder blocks obsoleted most forms of stonemasonry.

Linux is having a similar effect, right now, on the construction business we call the software industry. The balloon-frame construction of our time isn't Linux. It's UNIX. Linux just happens to be the form of UNIX that's most free & easy to apply. Your proprietary UNIXes tie builders to vendors. Linux doesn't do that. Neither do your BSDs, but for whatever reasons (and we won't go into them), Linux got the momentum.

All this came to mind when news came on Tuesday when news came that the following companies were lined up behind Linux as the new default OS platform for consumer electronics:

• Sony
• Matsushita (Panasonic)
• NEC
• Philips
• Samsung
• Sharp
• Toshiba

IBM is also reportedly interested.

The joint effort is called CLEF, for Consumer Electronic Linux Forum. It's the second shoe to drop on the matter. The first was dropped by Sony COO Kunitake Ando at the CES show in January, when he announced the formation of the group. Now it looks more serious than ever.

<http://www.wave-report.com/other-html-files/ces2003.htm>

CLEF is essentially an endorsement of Linux as something more than a platform. It's a way to build consumer electronic devices. It's a way that was shown to them, no doubt, by their own engineers.

Now the question for me is, will they be open to third party developments on top of their CLEF platforms? Not clear.

Meanwhile, here's a line from one of the first emails I received on the subject:

"This is interesting as using linux will kill the broadcast flag / carnivore lunacy and get devices back to serving bits."

Let's hope so.