A lot of people – including the BBC – are touting Google’s Chrome OS as a competitor to Windows and Linux:
The news could also be a blow to the open source Linux operating system, which had taken an early lead on netbooks, but then lost out to Microsoft’s elderly Windows XP. (BBC link)
Of course, this isn’t the case. Chrome OS is just another distro, albeit one backed by an enormous amount of dosh:
The software architecture is simple – Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. (Google blog)
UPDATE: I note that the BBC has removed the paragraph quoted above.
It’s an interesting idea – a distro where the only app is the browser – but it’s not really anything new; it’s just another iteration of the thin client idea. Of course, it might be the right iteration this time.
It also rather goes against a lot of the ideas people like Alec and Adriana are coming up with – ideas of owning one’s own data are rather scuppered by every application running on some anonymous server somewhere. Maybe, after a while, users of Chrome OS will start to buy UI-less home servers to run their apps on and store their data.
Maybe we need a UI-less distribution of Linux, running Apache (or whatever) and a whole bunch of open source webapps – word processing, spreadsheets – and, of course, a Mine! server.
>ideas of owning one’s own data are rather scuppered by every application running on some anonymous server somewhere
Unless it’s yours :-)
I’m not worried by more and more browsers; I am watching my colleagues realise that all the blogs they have on blogs.sun.com are rather a single point of failure and that their continued publication is at the whim of Larry Ellison. Suddenly people are really really interested in the means of exporting and transporting their blog to another platform, which would not be an issue was the software under their control. I’ve had three people say they now understand why I’ve always been blogging elsewhere…
As a counterpoint, go browse "Opera Unite" which is really interesting; presented as a way for you to take back ownership your data, it is in fact a truly remarkable way for Opera to host (read: "cache and serve") your data on the Web in a way that gives them a degree of control; as an Eminence Grise for the "empowered user" it would present an interesting attack on Google’s stranglehold of free services and cloud data.
All theMineProject seeks to do is go a step further and expunge the middleman.
>a distro where the only app is the browser
Anyone here remember HotJava? :-)
ps: regarding headless Linux servers: see is.gd/1rfe2