Google Chrome OS on Linux

[Francis Earl]

On Wednesday 08 July 2009 2:25:40 Tuna wrote:
> Top posting as a crazed act of revenge,
>
> Open Source is almost trendy,
> largely because of Google and their Android platform. 

You can't be serious? Most people still have no idea what Open Source is! 
Consumers certainly could care less what their devices and computers are 
running, provided the interface is attractive and they can do what they want 
to accomplish with ease.

> Now netbook owners
> everywhere will brag about their Linux-based open source operating
> system, forgetting the freedoms they give up with could computing.

What freedoms are they giving up exactly? Remember that they're coming from 
Windows are OS X more than likely... not to mention all the technologies 
Google has already created that move things like storage etc to the computer 
rather than staying on the server. Not to mention, most aren't programmers 
anyways, so being able to look at the code and tweak it means diddly to them.

Application oriented companies will never open source everything, Google will 
not push that on them via ChromeOS. Many companies are already coming out with 
web based alternatives to their apps, and I expect with HTML5 for the lines to 
basically go away with relation to what can and can't go into the browser.

Qt for instance is porting their toolkit entirely onto the web, Adobe has 
released web based apps for their popular software too, even Microsoft is 
rumored to be creating a web based MS Office. To my way of thinking, this is a 
dream come true for Linux... finally a Linux OS will not have to say "oh, we 
don't have photoshop, but we have gimp... you'll get used to its interface 
eventually, I promise"... this doesn't go over well when that user has spent 
10+ years working with Photoshop.

> I guess
> that's all we can do, get creative web people on our side, using the
> AGPL.

See, that's just it, people CAN open source web apps too, and you provide a 
license that explicitly is designed for this purpose. I don't see how that is 
any different from the current situation where some people use FOSS licenses 
but most don't for their software? It's just now the web is powerful enough to 
move everything there, in a standards based way, and without performance hits.