In many ways the web is much more engaging and free than desktop free software. Actually, in almost all ways. There’s no Wikipedia on the desktop, or even real wikis; even the things that call themselves wikis show off how different the ideas are: freedom to change your private information is nowhere near as democratic as freedom to change everyone’s publicly shared data. And maybe you are more free locally (no reverts), but it’s only because no one cares. Impotence will garner you a great deal of freedom.

And for the record, with Appengine you actually can change the software on Google’s servers. It’s not a panacea, it’s not complete, not every piece of software (even on Appengine) will be modifiable. Probably not most; but Google can’t change that even if it wanted to. Still the only environment as democratic as Appengine is the LAMP stack; which is great for LAMP, but I think Google deserves some credit for approaching the problem with a pointedly simplified environment. And LAMP and the web are frankly is more accessible, more programmable, more viable as a democratic platform for people to make a difference with software, than is any desktop environment.

I don’t buy the argument that since we’re moving to Web based applications we have to use Google services. No we don’t.

The Linux desktop Gnome/KDE fanboys need to read How Microsoft Lost the API War and start creating some kick-ass Web applications instead.

The Free desktop is the browser!

I would think then, that most of the market share that Chrome OS will be grabbing will come from non-free OSes – which would cause no “net loss of freedom”. Another reason to believe that is that users that made a conscious choice for a free desktop-OS are less likely to give up their freedom than users who didn’t have that freedom anyway. In other words: Chrome OS is not so much a threat to us as it is to MS and Apple.

On the other hand, we will benefit from Chrome OS’ success: it’s GNU/Linux base means we too will enjoy more extensive hardware support from vendors, and the success of Google Docs will help the push towards actually using those open document standards (I still find many peers annoyed when I send them ISO-compliant ODFs ).

I guess I’d even go as far as saying that anything that helps break the monopoly-situation on the desktop market will improve the situation for free software, too, simply because having multiple big players results in faster adoption of open standards.

With every shift from a piece of free software to a web-based network service, we have moved from a situation where a user had control over his or her software — users’ of “traditional” free software have access to source and have control over the system on which the computer runs — to a situation where users have very little control over their software at all.

True, but just imagine if Chrome OS would embrace AGPL as the standard license. Also providing tools to easily move your data to a different instance of the same web app hosted on a different web server (maybe your own).

I know it will probably never happen, but it would be interesting to fork the supposedly open Chrome OS project to implement such a scenario.

Marco Clipperz co-founder