OT Chrome OS next year

[Michael M. Moore]

On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 13:01 +0100, 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.), 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 will always have the freedom to modify or redistribute the
software if the software is released under a free software license.
People will not have the freedom to modify or redistribute Google's
services for the obvious reason that Google's services are proprietary.
If you don't want to use proprietary services, don't use them.

The advantage, at least as I understand it, to Google Chrome OS is that
is will be set up to use Google's web services from the get-go.  Just
boot up, sign in, and you're off.  That's why it's targeted at netbooks,
machines whose primary purpose is to provide Internet access from
anywhere.  They are, by design, limited in their capability.  Many will
see this as a great deal -- no muss, no fuss, no fiddling, just email,
edit, chat, listen to music, watch videos, etc., all in the cloud.  Many
others won't be interested.  If Google's services have limited appeal to
you, then this won't interest you.

> 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.

Huh?  You can already access documents saved in Google Documents from
anywhere, you can already access all of Google's services from anywhere.
You can save anything saved to Google's services anywhere, in any format
you wish (either natively or by converting it).  You fears might be
valid if Google was developing proprietary formats and tying their
services to those formats, but Google isn't doing that, nor can I think
of any reason why they would try.  They would be shooting themselves in
the foot and they know it.

I don't see a big difference between what Google is doing and what
Ubuntu is doing with its Ubuntu One service.  Ubuntu One will only be of
use to people running Ubuntu; Google Chrome OS will only be of use to
people who want to use Google's services.  There is nothing inherently
anti-free-software about either of those.  They are proprietary services
built on top of free software.  Actually, I think this is one of the
advantages of the free software development model -- it enables a wide
variety of companies and organizations to make use of shared development
resources to build value-added services they would never have the
resources to build from scratch.

And I think the advantage to free software of Google using a Linux
kernel is that, in one fell swoop, a lot of other web services out there
will jump on the bandwagon, if Google Chrome OS takes off.  Currently,
there are a lot of services out there with poor APIs that make Linux
compatibility hard to achieve or maintain, and there are many services
that just can't be accessed from any Linux OS.  Similarly, there are
still hardware manufacturers who's Linux support is poor or
non-existent.  That will all change with a popular, widely used consumer
Linux OS in the marketplace.  It will make people realize that Linux
support can't be just an afterthought, it will be another nail in the
coffin of Microsoft's hegemony.

None of this, in and of itself, is going to be a game-changer, but it is
a big step in the right direction, a direction that should enable other
steps down the right roads.  I think free software users and developers
should be happy about this, even if Google's services are of no interest
or use to you whatsoever.  From this, good things will come.

(Unless, of course, the whole thing is a big flop!  But in that case,
we're no worse off than we are now, and people will still learn from
Google's mistakes.)

-- 
Michael M.