[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:09:21AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
>> However, this could be the inroads for 'Linux on the Desktop' that
>> people talk about all the time.  The debates about its readiness or
>> suitability, discussions on the availability of needed applications,
>> etc.  Reading the articles about ChromeOS, it sounds like the OS is
>> really going to be irrelevant, they're really focusing on developing
>> more cloud *cough* web-based *cough* apps, that will run in any
>> standards-compliant browser.  Their 'OS' will be just enough Linux to
>> launch their Browser as the UI, to access their apps, that exist in
>> the Google cloud.
>
> The problem I see with that is, the "Linux on the Desktop" as it were,
> was the original idea behind Red Hat and it has never taken off to the
> point that enough people actually run Linux on their desktop computers
> that anyone says it's a serious contender against Windows.

I don't know that I ever thought of the earlier Red Hat releases as
seriously attempting to be desktop-ready.  As I recall, the first real
effort to make a desktop friendly Linux was Caldera Desktop Linux, which
was based off Red Hat (2.something, IIRC), but at the time, RH was still
shipping stuff like FVWM as it's default window manager, maybe it was
that horrible mangling that wound up getting bundled as 'fvwm95', which
had a Windows-style 'Start' button.  Back then, I was still jumping back
and forth between FVWM 1.x and tvtwm.

> Since it will be a small part of ChromeOS, it won't be spoken about as
> Linux.  People won't say "my computer runs Linux", but they will say
> if asked, that it runs ChromeOS. If they are asked isn't that Linux,
> most of them will say "what's Linux"?

True enough.  Just like I would imagine very few people refer to their
G1 phones as running Linux, they refer to it as running Android.  The
kernel, by that point, is rather irrelevant.

> In the end, Linux will be on a lot of desktops, but no one will know
> or care.
>
> One also has to wonder if Google will decide that the GPL is too
> restrictive as Apple did. Apple had a Mach Kernel Linux for the older
> PPC Macs, and abandoned it for BSD. I don't have a source to quote,
> but I remember it was because of the GPL, they wanted to keep parts of
> it "secret".
>
> Geoff.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org