Here are Chrome OS’s sins, laid out one-by-one:
1. Chrome OS will include proprietary technologies. Linux still lacks a high-quality open source Flash plugin. Practically the only choice for 100% site compatibility is to use Adobe’s proprietary plugin, so Chrome OS will need to license and include it out of the box…
Then there are multimedia codecs. People are gonna want to play their tunes and watch their movies…Google will have to license the patents covering them. This will offend the open source community, who see the software patenting system as broken and corrupt…
2. Chrome OS was created to take away your privacy. Chrome OS exists to give Google access to your data. All of it. Chrome OS might be free of charge but you’ll pay for it with your online soul.
3. Google is big, ergo Google is evil. Open source people are suspicious of corporations, especially ones that are big. I have open source friends who won’t even shop at major supermarket chains, simply because of their size.
4. Chrome OS could destroy desktop Linux…The only people who were probably tight-lipped at the announcement of Chrome OS were Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu. Chrome OS could destroy Ubuntu, or at the very least kill dead its plans for world domination.
Ubuntu was always aimed at the common man, and Canonical has been extremely successful at promoting this message. Chrome OS has the potential to make Ubuntu entirely redundant. Some people will stick with it, of course, but Chrome OS is aimed at exactly the same type of general user as Ubuntu. The two will compete, and Chrome OS will win because Google has virtually infinite resources and brainpower compared to Canonical.
5. Chrome OS is not a community Linux…The way it will work is that Google makes Chrome OS available, and you can make use of it if you wish. They might invite community feedback, and perhaps even source code patches, but they are in charge. You get what they give you…
Of course, none of this matters. Chrome OS isn’t aimed at Linux fanatics. It’s aimed at the ordinary user. Who cares what the fanatics think?
But it does matter. A lot. Chrome OS is a test of whether open source can actually live-up to its declaration of freedom. Most open source licenses are about freedom, provided certain caveats are followed.
The Linux community is a religious community. They have saints and prophets. And the same range of excuses for not delivering on the Promised Land.
Google is ready and willing to be the Catholic Church.
Will it offend the Open Source Community?
So what? It will live and die on its merits, just as Linux has. Sounds like sour grapes from a community that couldn’t promote their own product. A lot of the “sins” are why no one wants to use Linux.
2) and 5) are real reasons (and the reasons I wouldn’t touch Chrome or Chrome OS with a 10ft mouse).
1) Will offend select few “vegan” Linux users but majority have shown to be pragmatic when it comes to few proprietary bits.
3) Countered by the Google striving to help Open Source community, hence neutralized.
4) is from someone who doesn’t understand Linux following at all (people who do or would use Linux will not be too excited about unmodifiable proprietary OS)
4) Big deal! Microsoft has virtually infinite resources and brainpower compared to other tech companies, and…
Hum. Never mind.
Kittens offend the open source community.
#3 Geta grip… Microsoft has lost its way and has screwed up almiost everything its been involved with in the past few years.. it has lost direction.. and like all things one day will become insignificant..
my 16 year old daughter..loves Linux and never uses Microsoft products… you can live without MS.. but lets see what Google provides… unfortunately it will have a BIG Brother element..and that I do not Trust… the freedom on the web is slowly being eroded here too… “Ve Are Vatching You”…
If Google uses OS code then they must allow everyone to access the code. That is the whole heart of the Open Source community.
If Google doesn’t play fair there could end up being a huge battle which Google would lose.
The open source crowd will whine about anything.
There’s no such thing as free. If Google offers a better product than the open source community then too bad.
Google has more minds behind it than Ubuntu? Wrong. Ubuntu, being open source (Debian, I think) has more minds by definition. But they aren’t paid as Google is. Google has more paid minds. It certainly has more money.
Whether Google succeeds or not depends on if their products work well, if they continue to work when you ‘net connection is down, and whether there are lots of lost data or broken into data or not THAT CAUSE HEADACHES for their users. Some people won’t care as long as it is perceived to work for them but anyone in the security biz will avoid it like the plague with anything at all sensitive. (We have enough to worry about after all.)
Ubuntu or (name your favorite free Unix distro) will continue to be the choice for most serious computer people on a budget while we’ll tinker with Chrome, and be forced (willingly for many albeit) to use Windows and OS/X to know what to do with those systems.
Linux is fine and dandy until you want to do something.
That’s overkill but…
If I want to do photo editing: Paint.net, easier to run than gimp, and photoshop for heavy duty uses
Microsoft Office: Not as buggy as OpenOffice, and has a better markup system.
Optimal iPod/Zune/whatever experience: not found on linux
Playing WoW/Crysis/Civ4: windows/mac: no hacking/emulating/wine needed
I’ve tried and used Ubuntu for a while, used slax here and there. I love the fact that Linux runs on embedded systems like routers, phones and the like, but on the desktop it’s just too limited. I read somewhere that linux slavishly copies the interface of Windows with KDE etc instead of fixing the underlying issue, and that’s true of a lot of open-source replacement applications. They copy the leader, with varying degrees of success.
There are exceptions: Firefox, Webkit, ddWRT, boxee/XBMC, VLC (love that), but those are also available on the windows/mac world. So we know that open source apps can work on a closed source OS, why not the other way around? Motivate companies to release high quality, timely, and feature complete closed source apps on the open source OS, and then I would be sold.
This won’t effect Market share much. Ubuntu/Linux still has no market share in that sense. Granted Google will piss off the Open Source Community, but not by what they’re doing, they’ll piss them off just by showing up. They’re a corporate giant. That community doesn’t need more reason to dislike them, it’s also part of what holds Linux back.
No, what holds the Open Source community back is its insistence that computer science be just that, a science, with source code being more like a discovery that you create and give to the world, rather than an attempt at selling the most flashy bloated crap you can as fast as possible regardless of functionality.
And that is also the Open Source community’s virtue.
Since when did Google suddenly become the evil big brother? I don’t get it, just because they are successful business they must automatically be evil. That’s bullshit.
I’m really tired of this bullshit. It’s a shame people like this have to stereotype Google as another evil microsoft that will eventually create crappy bad software that everyone will be made to use by corporate bobbleheads. All because it has grown and become successful? Why isn’t this same stereotype apply to Apple then?
Forget Yahoo, Microsoft has set their eyes on teh real prise in search. At the rate that Bing is growing right now, Microsoft will be buying the last little remnants of Google out next year.
ChromeOS is too little too late…
http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/10/bing-leapfrogs-yahoo-search-again/
Poor Yahoo investors… I bet they are livid. ChromeOS is a desperate and futile last bid to avoid being crushed by the Borg.
Does Mac OS X offend the Open Source Community? After all, it’s built on the open-source FreeBSD Unix. And even if it does offend some, should any of us worry about it?
Does Ubuntu offend Slackware users? I doubt it. Chrome OS will be just another Linux distribution. If Google does not charge for the OS, then Microsoft and Apple might need to step up their efforts. Chrome OS will be popular because it is from Google. How popular, only time will tell.
#[15-16] Yes, OS X offends part of the OS community. Not the BSD community since that is part of the purpose of the BSD license, but the GNU crowd hates the BSD community with a passion for giving away code with such a “libertine” license, as the GNU cooks like to say. They hate to see Apple profit from free code without any requirement to give something in return.
Yes, Ubuntu offends Slackware users, infamous for their l33ter-than-thou attitude. The Slackware crowd has a lot of spite towards Ubuntu.
looking forward to 7 years of Chrome OS beta
I think it will offend the Free Software Foundation and GNUers, but not open source in general.
Awwwwwwww…….and do I care???
# 20 Thinker said,
“Awwwwwwww…….and do I care??”
No.
#17 Luc
thanks for news from the nix/oss continent !
If Chrome is Open Source, then the open source community can easily hack it and fix the privacy problems.
I strongly encourage them to do so!
FINALLY an Engadget post I COMPLETELY agree with.
FINALLY a post about Chrome OS I COMPLETELY agree with.
Well, not to be too bitchy… but Windows kinda still lacks a high quality Flash plug-in. But yeah, it really bites on Linux.
I am not sure what the buzz is about. Other than search, what has Google developed that is complete. Their gmail, although adequate, has room for lots of improvement. Their google maps for smart phones is pretty good.
I think Google should spend more time completing the apps they are marketing, instead of adding a product which at best will be a marginally small success. I would rather partner with a distro and add resources to improve Linux and desktop environments.
#17 Luc
I’ve been to way too many conferences where the open source guys spent days arguing over which license to use. Zzzzzz……..
Yawn. Richard Stallman is the second dumbest moron on the planet.
Let me explain. I could care less. An OS that only runs a browser is crap. That goes double when it runs an OS that has a 3% market share.
I’d rather have a Blackberry.
on the surface of this it seems to really just suit google and google’s needs and not the linux commune as a whole… which sounds a little like software fascism to me…. what ever the greater good of inc and state… so be it. i mean come on… google all the doe ray me to build what ever microsoft has.. to rip off linux just for the cool…. seems to blow hard and like alot of shite google has been doing as of late probably won’t work out.