OT Chrome OS next year

[james mcm]

> >Better Google dominating the market, rather than Microsoft.
> >Though I believe it will be a long time before Microsoft is
> >dethroned. Google at least is contributing resources and
> >code to the open source world.
>

I wouldn't be so optimistic - a corporation never does anything out of
goodwill. They will help offline Free Software just so that more people can
have good access to their online services, but that doesn't make them a
friend of Free Software - all their online services are proprietary and
closed source. If anything this could be the doomsday scenario for Free
Software -  a push to web services where Free Software has effectively no
presence (due to running costs of servers, etc.), Google will then expand
their online services to cover more and more of what is traditionally done
off-line until everyone uses Google's proprietary services and have no
Freedom to modify or redistribute the software.

This will be a much harder fight for people will think being able to access
their documents elsewhere, and run the same services on all operating
systems is a benefit and Google has a lot of momentum (and money) in the web
services sector. Unless we see a real push for Free online services like
libre.fm - Free Software may become obsolete.

(Sorry if I quoted it wrong, I'm still new to mailing lists)
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