Can you please be more specific?

I mean, breaking laws is the classic, definitive version of being evil right? So in fact it sounds like you would prefer if they did do evil and broke the local laws and risked huge fines, being arrested or being completely banned from doing business?

Perhaps you've never left your home town and met other cultures, which makes it very easy for you to judge anything that does not comply with your set of values; But the world is a big and complex place and the subtleties what is or isn't evil varies wildly.

For instance you might enjoy erotic images, and being able to find them is not evil to you.. however in other countries and cultures this *is* in fact evil and illegal.

So "When in Rome, Do as the Romans do"

So does that mean that because I was a guild leader of a high profile WoW guild, I would also be qualified to lead an LA gang?

Sure does open a whole new set of career oppertunities

Of course if you even read the slashdot summary you would see that ChromeShell is a 'ChromeOS like' type thing, and not ChromeOS at all.

ChromeOS boots (that's full bootup and not resuming) in 7 seconds, and resumes in 3. They're working with bios firmware vendors to improve this though so boot times could become even less

Actually Google does not strut about mouthing "Do no evil", it's in the "Ten things we know to be true" (http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html) that it believes it can do business without being evil, but the strutting around mouthing the "Do no evil" mantra is done by the people who want to use it as some kind of perverted emotional blackmail to force a company to do their bidding.

Now evil is not an objective term, what to one could be considered 'evil' might be perfectly normal to others (drinking alcohol or seeing a woman's hair is 'evil' in some cultures, while heavenly in others) so it is an easy term to abuse.

However calling Google hypocritical while they are the #1 investor in open web protocols (openid, oauth, portablecontacts, opensocial, hyrbid openid/oauth, webfinger, salmon, etc), one of the largest contributors to open source (even though not everything is open source, or anywhere near perfect, they have more people working and contributing to opensource then say red hat, novel or any of the other classic OS companies), they actively sponsor Apache, OS events and motivate people to become OS contributors through the Summer of Code program, and on top of all of that they have released quite a bit over 100 large open source products and libraries.

So ok in your opinion Google's primary business should be desktop software, with Linux ports for each and every one of those products.. Ok and if you were a majority owner of Google that opinion might matter

In reality how ever Google is a web company, and most of the engineers at Google are working on web products that all work fine in Safari, Chrome, FF and even IE, so that really includes all major OS's, and thus sidestepping the 'platform wars' entirely. A smart move i.m.o.
 

This is absolutely a valid concern and it should be one of the criteria when you pick a service or program to use.

Luckily Google makes a large effort to make sure you can move away without any problems or much effort, to use your docs example:
http://www.dataliberation.org/google/google-docs

Short summary: Select docs (or select all), click export, select your preferred file formats (OpenOffice, PDF, MS Office, etc) and click ok

That's not to hard is it? Sure doesn't feel like lock-in to me

As the other poster pointed out, Google makes a serious commitment to not locking you in, so much so that there's an internal team that works with all product groups to make sure the end users retain those essential freedoms, the result of that is available at http://www.dataliberation.org/

I personally know of no other company that has such an initiative (would be awesome to see MS do the same though, but somehow I'm not entirely hopeful that we'll see that day).

So what exactly are you basing your information on? I mean, I know it's the year of 'bashing Google' in Chinese astrology or something, but I mean cmon, lets keep some facts in the discussion or all we're doing is random trolling

One slight detail that I hope wont get in the way of your ranting:

ChromeOS is a web OS, and in the browser you can do everything you can do in your regular browser, like changing your search engine to 'Bing', using MS Office 2010 online or Zohoo office, Yahoo mail, and any other competing web service you desire.

Web is the very opposite of a vendor lock-in, there's an unlimited amount of choice and Google always seems to do their best to allow for competition, the best practical example of this is how easy it is to change the search engine in Chrome to Bing vs the hiding of the Google search option in IE8.

Sure, Google does believe that 'anything that is good for the web will also be good for Google', so having powerful devices and browsers that make the web an attractive platform will also be good for Google in the end (more searches, more ads, more docs, more maps and location services, more waving, etc), but in no way are they locking people into any platform or product

Anyone who thinks that a device will be free underestimates how willing people in 3rd world countries are to build houses out of such devices, or nerds willing to wall paper their rooms with it, well you catch the drift I'm sure :)

On the other hand being able to have a 13" device without running into the fact that that requires a full Vista/Windows7 license (there's restrictions in the xp & cheaper netbook versions that limit them to 11" screens on netbooks) does make them a lot cheaper, but I fail to see how that would hurt the consumer?

Also some competitive pressure on Microsoft/Apple to lift such artificial restrictions that are designed to maximize their profit margins seems like a win for consumers in my book, or did we loose faith in this whole competitive market thing?

The only thing that does slightly worry me is the whole Murdoch / Microsoft assault on the open web, the alternative to robots.txt they propose (which allows partial pages to be indexed without being allowed to read the text around it) would allow spammers to create pages where only a popular search term bit of text would be surrounded by virii, scams and spam. It just won't work and it won't bring back the distribution monopoly's that Murdoch enjoyed for most of his (very long) life.

Or perhaps Google is just more Web focused?

Oh and as many other people pointed out, you can use any standard SIP client with Gizmo5, so there are valid alternatives out there

Color me confused, this is a brand of open source that I haven't heard of before: Are you saying that any company that uses open source software should also support Linux with all their projects?

Can you please point me to the text in the GPL/APL/BSD licenses that states that?

Or are you saying that companies *shouldn't* use open source software if they are not willing to see (by most recent estimates) a 1% to 2% Linux desktop market share as a primary platform?

Personally I would be happy that a large company is contributing new programming languages (Go), support & employ the main guy behind Python, contribute to the kernel, released their webbrowser and mobile phone os as open source, organize and sponsor a 'Summer of Code' projects that contribute to open source, spend heaps of cash sponsoring large open source conferences, and, well released over 100 open source projects?

In fact Google is one of the larger contributors to the OSS movement that I personally know of

Citing the "do no evil" does not make you automatically cool, smart or insightful imo, just boring and lame (something about crying wolf comes to mind)

The whole goal of ChromeOS is to have *no native apps*, it's all web baby, so a conspiracy theories about native ChromeOS Gizmo5 app might have to be re-thought.

Heh your comment reads like a FOX headline.

Sure there's no stable release of Chrome for Linux yet, however you can download the current dev version from http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

It's being worked on, and if anything ChromeOS (which is linux+chrome) should tell you they're taking it quite seriously

The fact that the comment has been modded insightful instead of funny is quite telling isn't it.

One thing I do wonder about, with many high profile news stories (michael jackson, hudson plane crash, iran uprising, etc) they are first reported on social sites, if the newspapers no longer wish to contribute to the open web, can we also ask them to pay for that content that they are 'stealing from tbe web' ? I mean by Murdoc's reasoning those leads must be worth some serious cash right?

Climate change: The only way to win is not to play

Seems fitting to me?