OT Chrome OS next year

[Odd]

james mcm wrote:
> 
>      >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.),

Free software hasn't had problems so far running their servers. Just
look at Debian and Ubuntu. They're pushing out updates and ISO
downloads in a big way, using lots of bandwidth. Still they manage.
I think you're being way too dramatic about this.

> 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.

People don't want all their apps living on the web, except those that
naturally reside there. The net is not stable enough for that yet.

> 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 <http://libre.fm> - Free Software may 
> become obsolete.

Again, the drama. People won't stop making free software just
because Google launches an open source OS. Free software
is evolving, just like proprietary software. I think people are
overthinking this.

-- 
Odd