Google Chrome OS on Linux

[Joseph Sinclair]

Ryan Rix wrote:
> On Tue 7 July 2009 10:24:10 pm Alan Dayley wrote:
>> Google announced the concept of a new operating system they are
>> calling Google Chrome OS.
>>
>> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
>>
<<SNIP>>
> And so begins the destruction of Free software :(
> 
> Moving to the cloud (using the linux kernel, no less!) will only make it 
> easier to provide closed and proprietary systems to the user. Sure, they may 
> be free as in beer, but try getting a hold of the sourcecode for gmail, or 
> flickr, or facebook. You can't. Yet, these dominate the world of even 
> GNU/Linux free software nuts. The web is not as open and free of a place that 
> the world makes it out to be.
> 
> All in all, a scary turn, and I fear that google is silently breaking its 
> "don't be evil" mantra, though its doing it in the slyest and most profound 
> way: By using free software against itself. I suppose it's time to do as Bob 
> Elzer says and "be a real man" and set up dIMAP account on KMail...
> 
> A sad day, imo,
> Ryan
---
I wouldn't interpret this as an attack on freedom or free software.  Google exists on the web, and anything that makes it easier for people to use the web is good for Google.

What I expect they're trying to do here is simply help to break the hegemonic monopoly stranglehold that one company has on the desktop.  Not because it's the right thing to do (although it is), but because that stranglehold is a direct threat to their own core business.  The current monopoly is aggressively targeting the search engine market with a heavily marketed rebranding of their own (IMO lousy) search service, and all of the related services as a means to gain even more revenues. There is also (again, IMO) substantial evidence to suggest that they are (ab)using their monopoly position to support that (e.g. many users claim a recent monopoly O/S "security update" changes the default search engine in all browsers to the vendor's own rebranded site, without warning or permission).
I do agree that this new web-centric O/S will definitely coax more people to run their entire system on web-based services. The counterpoint on that is that most services at least allow your *data* to be easily exported in standard formats, so users can switch services, or even migrate to actual applications if they choose.  That should mitigate much of the risk, since the Free software communities have proven themselves capable of outpacing the proprietary players in online services.  In fact most really powerful online systems can only function in a Free model, any other model is DOA (e.g. Wikipedia couldn't happen if the whole thing was proprietary, and they run open software because it's simply *better* for their application).

My expectation is that this won't damage or limit the growth of free software in any real sense.  I expect it *will* help to break the current monopoly problem in the O/S space, and leave users with more choices, on multiple dimensions.  Users will, in the end, have many options for proprietary and Free, online and offline, mobile and tethered, and a whole spectrum between each pole on each dimension.

The nice part of the new Google Chrome O/S is that it's 100% standards-based.  Everything written on the web for that platform will work just as well on all platforms except one (notably, the monopoly platform that's causing the most problems).  That means that it adds one more pressure point on all site designers, both Free and proprietary, to support web standards (rather than writing only for one monopolistic system).  In the end, that seems like a good thing all by itself, even if everything else I've said turns out to be false.
Another nice effect to keep in mind that this new O/S will also put a behemoth company behind getting even more *desktop* hardware working *well* with the Linux kernel, since they'll want every peripheral to "just work" with their system, and that means making it work with the Linux kernel (preferably with open in-kernel drivers).  Hopefully this will improve the few areas where vendors are still very reluctant to support Linux (USB scanners are a good example).

My apologies if this was a bit of a rambling post, I'm a bit tired, but I believe it is important to share a more optimistic counterpoint.


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