Chrome OS

It is a little too early to be bullish about this.

Okay, Google has released their plan for developing a Chrome OS and it is going to be open source. They want to create an OS which can load up in a few seconds on whatever devices, and redesign it in a way that fits with the current landscape of Web 2.0 and cloud computing in terms of supporting apps running inside a browser. People do wonder why Google does this, especially their effort in Chrome OS could be overlapping with the work in Android. One even speculates their major intention is to crush Microsoft so they just do whatever it takes.

Without reading much into details here is my take on this. First of all Chrome OS being open source and any variety of Linux OS being open source have similar means but different ends. Assuming Chrome OS supports mainly Google Apps and other applications running on the web, all the user generated data and information would be sent across and hosted by the infrastructure of the company. Yes I understand that with Google Gears all web apps can run offline and have the data stored locally as well, but we cannot deny the fact that the default mode of all the applications running on Chrome OS is to have every bit of data stored and managed by Google. Of course we get all the benefits of cloud computing no doubt on that, but we need to remind ourselves that cloud computing becomes the default rather than a nice option to have from this point onwards. Once again, Chrome OS is open source for the development but what about the infrastructure and the data, I mean our data?

Maybe I am over-reacting coz people did debate long time ago regarding GMail or other Google Apps on similar ground. But the different is, for GMail or Google Doc I can always have a choice to run some native apps no matter if I am on Windows, Mac OS or Linux, let's say if I am really paranoid about data mining and stuff like that. But if I am using Chrome OS, what choice do I have? Google Doc offline forever? I think the discussion should be on whether it is such a great idea to have cloud computing OS as a default for our computers and devices. If open source is about freedom, then trapping all my data to a single company does sound like the complete opposite. Yes I need to pay for Windows while Chrome OS is free, but I am paying Google the right to host my data. As a consumer, is it really a good thing for us to support companies to build their business model on top of our privacy, so that they can subsidize us some free software?