Archive for July 10th, 2009

So now the IT media world just went wild over Google’s Chrome OS announcement. Comments are coming in from all over, some overly optimistic, some dismissive. All of these are speculative at best, and none of them carry a lot of weight as Google hasn’t even done a code drop yet, much less a release.

Some of the comments surprise me, however. There seems to be this presumption that having something that’s OpenSource means you must “work with the community”. The GPL or any other OpenSource license defines the usage of the code. As long as you abide by the terms set in the licenses, you’re safe. Nowhere in the licenses do I see that you have to be part of a particular community to be OpenSource. The nature of OpenSource licenses are such that they encourage community-building (share and share alike) and a community is about the most efficient distribution model as well (especially with the lack of an official sales distribution channel). But it sure ain’t a prerequisite to join the club.

And there’s that word “community”. The word sounds warm and fuzzy, like everybody lives in a nudist colony and exchange kisses and hugs every time we meet. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a brutal world out there. I’ve been tracking flame wars between KDE and Gnome since someone decided that GPL wasn’t a liberal enough license for them and started writing a new widget library (corrected by Rahul on this). RMS poking his nose the Linux mailing lists every once in a while correcting everyone on the actual name “GNU/Linux” was pretty nice flame fodder for a while, and then it got old. Recently, there’s this whole tempest about including Mono into Linux distros by default. Debate is good, and coming to blows after a pint too many build stronger bonds, but it sure doesn’t mean that one has to take part in it.

Google has plenty of money / resources and may think that it can go solo with this one. And they are free to do so if they wish. They will still need to release the source code when they release regardless. Fine, they may decide to create a permanent fork of certain components or even use their own versioning system, making it hard for the rest of the “community” to take advantage of improvements. That goes both ways; it’ll be difficult for them to gain improvements from the other contributors as well. Apple did that with their WebKit fork of KHTML, where they did a periodic code dump into the original KDE source tree making it difficult for anybody to comprehend what enhancements were made. Yeah, it was grating on the rest of the KDE developers, but completely legal. But let’s take a step back now. Has Google been pulling a lot of this shit often? I really don’t think so. They maintain Google Code, which is being used for exactly what the “community” wants: community-based development. They announced Google Wave, and the next thing you know the Wave Protocol site is up for all to see. As far as being part of the community for development purposes is concerned, I think they’ve been doing that all this while and doing it better than most large companies.

So, what else do these communities want from Google?

It’s disappointing that they’ve chosen to go it alone this far rather than working with the existing communities – Joe Brockmeier

I think Intel made the right call with Moblin to put the effort in the hands of the Linux Foundation and try to work with the larger community – Joe BrockMeier

So, they want Google to work with “existing communities”. Well, it’s an OS they’re working on, and unless they start a complete new branch of the Linux kernel, I’m pretty sure they’d be working with the kernel team and submitting patches and all that. What other “existing communities” does Joe want them to work with? Ubuntu? His own Novell / OpenSuSE? As in, ride on your own product and endorse your product as “the preferred distro for Google’s OS”?

So let me get this straight: It’s not enough that you get the direct results of Google’s development effort, you want them to park themselves behind you and help you market your product as well?

Wake up, guys, this is competition. The distro stakeholders might be all pally when it comes to talking down the competition (Microsoft, in this case) and sharing code, but apart from that, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Chrome OS, as another Linux distro, would be operating at the same level with Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware/ad infinitum. And apart from the common code that they share with each other, the only other thing that they should share is the common desire to rip each other to pieces.

Now that’s capitalism.

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