Global Operating System and Global OS Shell

Global Operating System is a platform for problem solving for the 21st century.

• >>About Global Operating System
  • What is Globl Operating System?
  • What does it solve?
• >>Global OS Shell
  • What is Global OS Shell?
  • Requirements for Global OS Shell
  • wija as Global OS Shell

>>About Global Operating System

What is Globl Operating System?

An operating system (OS) abstracts resources, and provides them to users.

Today, personal computers have ample resources, everyone carries portable computing/communicating devices, and RFID/micro computers are to embed intelligence everywhere in our living environment. If we think about an operating system which scales to the global level, it would be a super widely integrated distributed environment that self-organizes in autonomous, distributed and cooperative ways, which would overthrow conventional OS designs.

In which CPU, memory, disk storage, network bandwidth, keyboards, displays, sensors, actuators, software, image, sound, documents, know-hows, automobiles and their seats, clothing, food, human beings and their talents, abilities and efforts are all handled as resources to be provided to users in need at the right time and in the right place so that they can be used efficiently. A new information environment will be born.

This kind of information environment will enrich our lives, reduce energy consumption and form local-production-local-consumption (LPLC¹) economy as a new foundation for our lives, which is robust and helps us live in accordance with the natural environment of the 21st century.

What does it solve?

Consider this problem: an unoccupied seat of a running automobile is a resource which can be shared by the humankind (by sharing the resource we will be able to reduce unnecessary consumption of energy to run another automobile). Program a network so that a pedestrian in need can discover the resource, and the driver can discover the pedestrian, which makes a hitchhike to the intended destination possible.

This problem involves many issues including mobility, geographical information, rendezvous and trust.

We believe that, in future information space, anyone who wants to solve such a problem can easily make a program by combining information available from Global OS, cast the program into the information space to solve the problem, and anyone else who wants to utilize the solution for themselves can use the program.

Today, web services exists in many countries which try to solve the above specific problem individually. Some examples, like the one in Washington D.C., are maintained by civil movements. However, those remain to be specific individual solutions.

Global OS provides a general framework to tackle problems like above and an unified platform for executing the solutions in reality.

>>Global OS Shell

What is Global OS Shell?

A modern OS consists of the inner-kernel, the outer-kernel and the shell². The inner-kernel abstracts the hardware. The outer-kernel gives abstractions to the resources to be provided to users. The shell provides the interface between the users and the resources.

The above figure shows how these concepts are applied to Global OS. The figure places human in the center, because the system is for the humankind, and there are numerous computers behind the OS. It is needless to say that the shell is the most important part of the OS for humans.

To the senses of humans, the Global OS would just feel like the shell.

Requirements for Global OS Shell

Each resource to be handled by Global OS is likely to be owned by someone. In the operation of the system, the users will need to coordinate their interests with those of others. Therefore, we believe that the shell has the following requirements:

1. Social networking
   • Users should be able to operate resources along with the connection of people which is visualized for the users, because it is often the case that users trust other users if they directly know each other or if they have a common acquaintance.
2. Mechanism for incentive and fairness
   • Users need to be incentivized to participate in solutions, and the outcome needs to be fair.
3. Mechanism for resource discovery and utilization
   • Users should be able to discover resources to realize LPLC.
4. Mechanism for reputation and trust
   • A distributed and autonomous basis for trust is necessarily a reputation system.
5. Mechanism for privacy
   • A bus to connect resources may need to be encrypted.
6. Programming environment
   • Users should be able to freely develop applications by combining available information from the OS.

wija as Global OS Shell

There is an existing framework of software that can satisfy the above requirements for the shell: instant messaging/presence sharing system with an extensible set of protocols. We have been developing wija since year 2003, in the hope that it will be a prototype of the Global OS Shell.

Consider loosely that the Internet will become the Global OS in the future. Then, wija visualizes human relations and works as a platform for "everything you can do over the Internet", functioning surely as the Global OS Shell.

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1	[LPLC] A philosophy that tells you to choose the one nearest to you if there are multiple equivalent resources to choose from.
2	The terminology is based on BTRON2 specifications.