12 minutes ago, AndyC wrote
If you want to write a shell replacement for Windows that includes a Start menu, you can. And you can sell it. And you can sell it with a copy of Microsoft Windows if you like (naturally you do have to pay Microsoft in that case, but we're talking free as in speech, not beer right?)
If, however, you want to write a replacement shell for ChromeOS, you can't. It's literally less "free" than Windows. That it's built on top of an Open Source, genuinely "free", kernel means that it's actually moving away from the principles of free software and more towards a closed, proprietary platform that you are supposedly against. It, like Android before it, is doing something the FSF once thought impossible - it's demonstrating how you take GPL code and turn it into a proprietary platform.
I'm not claiming Windows is some bastion of openness, but if you want to take the principled approach, then stick to Linux. Or accept that your principles aren't actually worth all that much to you after all. Promotion of Android/ChromeOS is entirely against the spirit that underpinned the original FOSS movement because it is not, and will never be, free.
That's incorrect though. ChromiumOS including the shell is open source. It can be modified by anyone. The idea that Chromebooks themselves are closed are incorrect either: you can enable developer mode on a Chromebook at install any Linux stuff you want. Sure, they could disable developer mode some day. But that makes Chromebooks (that is the hardware/software combination) proprietary. It doesn't make the code proprietary.
Chromium represents something called a contribution to the Commons. The Commons is the conglomeration of free content available on this planet, which is this baseline for culture and technology that anyone can start from without requesting permission from any authority to do so. Contributions the Commons are non-revokable, even if Google some day adopts the same business model as Microsoft with regards to ChromeOS, all their contributions from that point are still part of the Commons.
That is, it can be the starting point for a project by anyone on this planet where pay they retain certain rights over. They have the right to distribution and the rights to modification. These are given to by the original authors of the code to any derivative works. These are the essential rights, that are given to anyone who built on top of FOSS, that's what makes FOSS well, FOSS. ChromeOS is actually in a way, a derivative of Linux in that it leverages the engineering work on Linux.
They could have started from zero. Starting from zero, writing all the code needed to boot on a computer system is a significant difference from starting from a Linux kernel. So they didn't need to reinvent a new kernel or a lot of new code to make ChromeOS. This allows them to focus on the specific differences between their product and the Commons, instead of zero and their product.
They have the right to distribution and the rights to modification. Actually this is exactly why Google choose Linux over Windows to build ChromeOS. The power over what is possible with Windows is still fundamentally the preview of a single vendor. They would have to ask permission for Microsoft to distribute a ChromeOS derived from Windows code in the manner they distribute ChromeOS today (royalty-free, and fully open source from kernel up). It is unlikely that even if Google asked nicely, that Microsoft would grant Google these kind of rights. Even if they did it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that they had to ask for permission to produce such a derivative work. This is not strictly non-necessary in truly FOSS works.