[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Michael Parson]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 07:58:00PM +0100, Mike Meredith wrote:
>
>> I don't think at this point it would be possible to kill Linux (or
>> *BSD for that matter). Whilst the 'great unwashed' may well see Linux
>> as part of Google/OS, there will still be a few weird people doing
>> their own thing with 'just' Linux or 'just' *BSD.
>
> That's why I put it in quotes. Linux will IMHO fade away as it just
> becomes part of the operating system. Some people will keep the name
> alive as a seperate entity, and some will use it. However now there
> are far more computers running MacOS, which is UNIX, than all other
> variants combined ever.

Google's use of Linux for this new Chrome OS will be about as relevant
as their use of Linux on the Android Platform.  There is very little
that is Linux about those devices, mostly, Linux provides the basic
underlying bits to give them a filesystem to store things and the device
drivers to handle things like the network, keyboard, etc.  99.95% of
everything else is done in the Android environment, which is a JVM
running a pretty application launcher and provides all the APIs for the
apps we're running on our phones.  It just as easily could have been
NetBSD, Darwin, or even OpenSolaris under the covers, and I'm sure that
Google could re-do this on one of those kernels with minimal effort.

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.

Which brings us back to the discussions on how much this company already
knows about each of us, and now they're going to have copies of all our
documents we work on, etc.  I still contend that one day, the Google
'cloud' will become self aware and we will realize the reality of
SkyNet, when it plots to enslave/destroy all of humanity, as if there
were ever a computer system that would know enough about humanity to
see that we needed to be destroyed, it would be Google's. ;) And the
*BSD people would finally have their vindication, in that the world was
destroyed by Linux.

> BTW, I wonder if you ask those "Maccies" who know that MacOS is UNIX
> to define UNIX, they won't be able to tell you, except that it's part
> of MacOS.

I take offense to that ;-)

I'd wager that most Mac users out there don't know that this OS is UNIX
under the covers, and even if they did, it was just because they read a
blurb about it once when they read one of the release notes, but about
30 seconds after that, they promptly forgot, because that phrase was
quite meaningless to them.

> Like that, if Google/OS takes off, there will be in a couple of years
> more computers running Google/OS than there ever were running "Linux"
> (notice the quotes and I said computers).

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org