With and Not Against: Canonical Collaborates on Chrome OS
The Chrome OS announcement caused speculation from many sides as to what effect the Google platform would have on other Linux distros. At least Canonical could benefit from it.
Chris Kenyon, who is responsible at Canonical for its OEM business, in a recent blog entry congratulated Google on its source code release and also answered a few questions about Ubuntu's relationship with Google. In it he announced, "Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract." That is, Canonical is helping finance certain work on Chrome OS and some other Google components.
Kenyon also makes clear in the blog that cooperation is at least as important as competition in the open source market. Also that Google's Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson repeatedly emphasized that Google as much as possible wants to "build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention." Canonical thus sees Chrome OS not so much as competition than as an enhanced Linux product.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.