I imagine thousands of bloggers have commented on gOS, a Linux distribution featuring shortcuts to Google web application on the desktop and preloaded on a PC sold (out) for $200 at Wal-Mart. Someone asked me to blog about it and I do find plenty interesting about it, so thus this post.

I started predicting that Linux would take over the desktop in 1994 and stopped predicting that a couple years later. The increasing dominance of web-based applications may have me making that prediction again in a couple more years, and gOS is a harbinger of that. Obviously web apps make users care less about what desktop operating system they’re running — the web browser is the desktop platform of interest, not the OS.

gOS also points to a new and better (safer) take on a PC industry business model — payment for placement of shortcuts to web applications on the desktop (as opposed to preloading a PC with crapware) — although as far as I know Google isn’t currently paying anything to the gOS developers or Everex, which makes the aforementioned cheap PC.

This is highly analogous to the Mozilla business model with a significant difference: distribution is controlled largely by hardware distributors, not the Mozilla/Firefox site, and one would expect end distributors to be the ones in a position to make deals with web application companies. However, this difference could become muted if lots of hardware vendors started shipping Firefox. This model will make the relationship of hardware vendors to software development, and particularly open source, very interesting over the next years.

One irony (long recognized by many) is that while web applications pose a threat to user freedoms gained through desktop free and open source software, they’ve also greatly lowered the barriers to desktop adoption.

By the way, the most interesting recent development in web application technology: Caja, or Capability Javascript.