Google: Yes, the Chrome OS Will Be Free
One of the biggest questions people had is if Chrome OS will be free. Yesterday we asked what the main difference was between Google and Microsoft and a lot of you arrived at the same conclusion: Google services are free. However, we still didn’t know if Google would decide to charge for its newfangled OS, initially aimed at netbooks. The answer is yes, the Chrome OS is open source and will be free.
Vice President of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, who announced the Chrome OS yesterday, also addressed developers interested in working with Google: Pichai says that later this year, the Google Chrome OS code will be open source and to “stay tuned” for more information, which isn't much but at least it's coming, right?
Unfortunately that was pretty much all the details the company had to offer people eager to find out more about the OS, which is a little disappointing. That said, this isn’t like the Chrome browser, which was announced a few days early because of a leaked comic but was completely finished. We expect to hear more about the Chrome OS as time goes on but at this early stage, it’s probably going to be a while before we get any really good details about the software.
Google did release a list of partners it’s working with (and it is LONG). Read more about it here.
Wasn't wasn't the correct term. There weren't many details.
Yes, please I would love to see that. Linux has too many options even inside one Distro. It sure would be nice to have universal Linux executables at least for realated Distros, and not have to patch and compile nearly everything. There's already varieties of Linux that have low hardware requirements. DeLi Linux, Damn Small Linux(DSL), VectorLinux, etc.
True*
*And all your private files on your computer.
Chrome will die before born, like many others: red hat, suse, fedora, mandrake, ubuntu etc. No game support, no market.
Like the Android operating system they will make money from the adds they already have seen when you use the google to search or the internet or login to your gmail web account.
By creating a system that integrates the use of your google account and the use of local media in to one big happy shake they make sure those who use google mail and or other google services stay there.
After i boasted my G1 my brothers wanted one to and even though i set it up to work with their current on-line services they chose to go google because they felt like it was the right thin to do.
There is a serious flaw in that motivation specially if its the only one but it works.
Sadly, if anything, Chrome OS will eat into the existing netbook linux distro (eg. Asus' Xandros spin) market share rather than MS' share. That is unless Google can somehow run these deal-breaker apps on their distro. IMHO, that would be a prerequisite to the big push against Windows the internet seem to be raving about these days.