The Open Sourcerer

This could be pretty big.

Google announced, in their own rather subtle way – via a blog post – their new Google Chrome OS. It’s quite exciting simply because it is from Google and what the objective of the OS is:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

For us Freedom lovers there’s good new too:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010…

… We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Techcrunch had a great headline on this announcement: Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome.

Here’s a quick thought that that headline inspired…

If Google are ultimately as successful in the OS space as they have been in the on-line space, then I can see some major investigations and calls from such places as Redmond for Google to be split into smaller entities. In a somewhat ironic repeat of what happened to AT&T back in the 70s.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my mind. Even though Google claim to “do no evil” a monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. This is early days and clearly we aren’t anywhere near there yet but they are growing fast and becoming even more ubiquitous than AT&T; which was essentially only a USA monopoly.

I’d love to hear other thoughts on this:

Do you care what happens?
Do you think it is too early in the morning and I should stay in bed rather than talk drivel?
Do you think Google Chrome OS is a non-entity?

Tags: AT&T, Free Software, Google, Linux, Open Source

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 8:01 by Alan Lord and is filed under FLOSS in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.