InsideTech

great news!!!! keep spreading...

I just knew they would. Its gonna be a awesome OS because of the Linux base.

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Why is it that people always assume that commercial applications have to be closed-source? Yes, it is difficult to prevent someone from changing your application a little bit and ripping you off when you put it out for free, but the free software community has had to deal with predatory commercial companies residing in Redmond, WA, Silicon Valley, and Utah for many years. They still exist. Can commercial companies let go of the idea that they have to control every last thing done with their product? Sun did that with Java, and eventually with their OS. They still managed to stay strong. IBM is moving in that direction with the DB2 Express-C and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, as well as their contributions to the Eclipse project. Microsoft? Well, when I was a member of MSDN, they allowed you to pay for the source code to old, unsupported versions of NetMeeting and a few other applications from the Windows 3.1 days (this was shortly before I started with Linux and bought into BeOS - too bad JLG let that one go, but I digress). After looking at Microsoft's code - uncommented, circuitous logic and include files written so that every header file depended on five others which depended on each other and five more, plus the one that depended on them in the first place and general poor coding practices, I am happy that I have not seen another Microsoft source file since. That said, the comments about "use the one you have instead of complaining about it" are just uneducated drivel. Following this logic, we would never buy a new shirt when we get a hole in our best ones, never buy new underwear (well, the guy who made that comment probably has skid marks seven layers deep) and eat the same apple fifteen days in a row, hoping it will magically renew itself daily. Let's face it, sometimes you just can't use what you already have. You MUST replace it. The nice thing about Linux has always been the fact that it allows you to keep using that seven-year-old computer for another ten or twelve years without buying anything new.Windows? New version came out, oh, and what a surprise, my hardware is not supported. Guess I have to go out and spend money on another computer to run it, and guess what? The new hardware I need is just as much as what I paid for this system when the last version came out. Now what do I do with this old computer? Landfill? Recycle it? Linux? Now we have Google OS. What Linux always needed to compete on the desktop market was a desktop interface that people could use. I have used KDE, Enlightenment, GNOME, and even FVWM95. I like all of them for different reasons. Google wants to pick one for many people to use? Fine, as long as I can change if I prefer to use something different. We need a better way to install programs? Well, coming from one of the die-hard Slackware users, we have never had it easy installing software, and we kind of like it that way. It is more of an accomplishment to install WebSphere MQ Series for Linux on Slackware, since the installation instructions assume everyone runs Red Hat derivatives. Keep the development tools, Google, so that I can actually do something with the source you provide and I will be happy.

Oh, don't get me wrong.. I think Google basing this on Linux will definitely help the Linux community as-is... it's just not what many people might think. You'll have more people getting paid to write Linux code... and unlike the stuff Google has in-house (they run Linux servers, but don't have to release code under the GPL because they're only offering services), this will definitely advance Linux development.

Maybe in big ways. If ChromeOS is using all Linux underpinning, and starts to challenge Windows on the desktop, then soon you'll find everyone doing Linux drivers.. the API won't be Linux, but the driver model will. So that'll be great.

What you're not getting is what I think many of us Linux users kind of hoped for when Linux started getting out on netbooks... Linux itself, the full thing, standing up to Windows in the consumer market. That won't happen until you have a route to Linux apps, installers, and support that works as well as what's out there in Windows-land. That could follow the shrink-wrap model of Windows apps, or the on-line thing that seems to finally have caught on (Apple established this for the iPod/iPhone, Google's going that with Android, but this was all defined back the days of BeOS... using the net directly). So far, it's not at the consumer level.

And it's not that I think Linux is so consumer-ready... it's just that WIndows isn't, but it's sold that way. If you had a more consumer friendly Linux application portal (something that unifies Linux, at least in the consumer's eye... installs always work, no dependency problems, GUI-apps hooked into user menus, someone to call about the apps when users have problems, etc), you might actually do as well as Windows toward the consumer. Much of the rise of Linux has been based not just on being better than Windows for geeks, but even being as-good in general. In the mid-1990s, I was very much against Linux, on very sound technical ground. Linus et. al. finally accepted a bunch of tweaks that fixed their "fake realtime" behavior to at least match Windows. After that, I though... well, we really have something here. More recent things like Ubuntu (I run Ubuntu studio on two PCs, and used it recently as the basis for a 1U 8-core transcoding video server) only cement this.

Bottom line: I'd like to see increasingly viable alternatives to Windows, and personally, that has to include commercial software options.. hardcore Linux folks get all annoyed at the remote prospect of closed-source apps. But that's ultimately needed to expand beyond a certain user base... that's a necessary part of establishing a mainstream presence.

@hazy: even if they only run the linux kernel, if it runs on a regular intel based pc and it gets enough interest it won't be long before people have the groundwork laid to run everything else. The main thing that causes obscure linux builds to suffer is lack of interest; it's not like it's impossible, or even that difficult, to recompile all the necessary libraries and apps on anything that runs the linux kernel. After all, that's the whole point.

Haha I called this months ago, specifically that Google's next step would be a web OS for netbooks. If it really is Linux-based, even better - being able to run Linux apps means being able to run most Windows apps through Wine and most Windows games through Cedega. With any luck they'll take enough market share to force hardware manufacturers to consistently support linux with their drivers. Google has the marketing power to make it happen

@the incredibly paranoid: Google doesn't index information for the fun of it, it indexes information so it can deliver search results paired with related advertising. It has absolutely no use for the data on your hard drive, any more than it has use for selling your email from gmail or your docs on Google docs. It would make no sense to do that anyway; can you say class action copyright infringement lawsuit? It is *open source* meaning if there was some "secret sneaky code" it'd get found pretty quickly. I don't mean to be harsh, but don't be stupid. Besides, Windows XP and Vista already have an indexing service (much like Google desktop) built into the OS, so suppose they are big evil corporations and they are stealing your oh-so-important personal data, how is your situation worse off with Google than it is with Microsoft, exactly? Come on.

Not to sound skeptical or paranoid, but I agree with OfNo Consequense. Google's purpose is to gather information, and what better way to do that than get everyone's computer (and all it's data) "indexed" into their search engine with an OS.