Chrome OS Could Offend the Open Source Community

I'm not really a fan of the cloud computing paradigm. There's the privacy and security issues. And then there's the hardware. If everything were to move to the internet and become web-based, our hardware would change and alter our freedom to run the OS of our choice. Why? Because as the head of the Linux Foundation stated, "the OS is irrelevant."

And once your hardware changes, you no longer have the ability to choose your apps or compile in your options.

Posts from Steve Rosenberg about his various and sundry experiences installing different Linux distributions and *BSD's will vaporize because the hardware which allows us to do this will no longer exist.

You'll no longer be able to administer your own system because you'll no longer have a system or even an OS to do that with.

It'll just be you, your apps (served up according to the cloud's developer's whims) and the cloud...

Sounds promising, does it not?

There will be no "winner" in the fight between the cloud and client-based apps/storage. In my view, the cloud, or networked storage or whatever, is just another piece of the productivity puzzle.

Nobody's going to make your traditional apps go away, just like Microsoft can't make my 233 MHz CPUs disappear, even though there is no currently available version of Windows that I'd even want to run if it were available for a reasonable price. That's what we have Linux and the BSDs for -- to give us options on both our newest hardware as well as the dusty junk in the closet.

Look at my Sparcstation 20. I jumped at it because I got it almost for nothing, but I should've held out for a 64-bit CPU model because there isn't, to my knowledge, a single Linux distribution that runs on 32-bit Sparc. But I've still got NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris 9. Those two BSDs are just about the only operating systems under current development that still port to 32-bit Sparc.

My point, weak as it is, is that I shouldn't expect a "modern" OS to run on 14-year-old Sun hardware, but I'm glad that particular itch is one that developers continue to scratch.

> ...because there isn't, to my knowledge, a single Linux distribution that runs on 32-bit Sparc.

Remembering that there was a version of Slackware for Sparc at one time, I checked, and it appears that it's still in existence and runs on a Sparc 20. See http://www.splack.org/ especially the thread on the Sparc 20 at http://www.splack.org/index.php?topic=hardware

Just don't expect the bells and whistles of a full modern distribution.

There's also a list of Sparc distros at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-12.html but it doesn't look like there's anything really current on it.

@jdixon: Your first link got a comma included into the URL.

http://www.splack.org/

I see more potential good than harm from Chrome OS

It is just another Linux distro, with it's own window manager.

With Google behind it, it may help to push Microsoft out of it's dominant position which can only benefit Linux as a whole!

Quoting:I see more potential good than harm from Chrome OS

It is just another Linux distro, with it's own window manager.

With Google behind it, it may help to push Microsoft out of it's dominant position which can only benefit Linux as a whole!

OTOH, others have viewed Google's developments much less favorably. Referring here to the recent LXer thread 'Poor reporting and other topics pertinent to this item' at http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/29307/ See the series of comments here starting with that of Jul 09, 2009 5:37 AM EDT One of the latest thread comments in this series at the time of this writing is:

Quoting:Yep they [Google] are just another compnay, to be trusted as much, or as little, as any other large Corporation. But then, as far as I was concerned that was always the case.

So there can be some potential concerns here regarding Google's designs for Chrome OS.

> Your first link got a comma included into the URL.

Sigh. Fixed. I put a space in there, but to no avail. :(

Quoting:Yep they [Google] are just another company, to be trusted as much, or as little, as any other large Corporation.

Indeed, this is true. However that doesn't mean that things they do will be bad for Linux, on the other hand, it doesn't mean anything they do will necessarily be good for Linux. Google are USERS of Linux and Free Open Source Software, it is useful to Them. If aiding the uptake of Linux, in General, is perceived by Google as good for Google then that's what they will try to do. If not....

@jdixon:

Looks fixed from here...

There is one thing to be said though, If your whole GUI is the browser, then there is nothing that you could conceivably be forced to unbundle.

@az:

Microsoft tried that (or something closely resembling that) with Windows 98. The idea was to blur the line between The Internet Browser and The File Browser, even going so far as to present filenames to look like HTML links and single-click to activate (open) files.

The "tight integration" became a major issue, because it interfered with browser choice. Even when people wanted to run Netscape, IE kept popping up somehow. They got into some pretty deep doo-doo for it, for a while anyway.

what MS did was not the same, although similar. Think if you will if there is no WM/DE at all (ms did not do this) all there is in its place is 'X :0 -ac & DISPLAY=:0 firefox & '

Tell me, as far as GUI and Desktop ... what is there to unbundle now? If you rip the guts out, so there is no irssi, links, wget, or package manager that can be accessed via a command prompt? MS's little pipe dream lie, can actually be built ... if you set your sights on it from the begining.