GPL states you must make the source code available, and it is, on developer.android.org
Depending on licenses of libraries, any custom interfaces probably don't require source code being shipped either, since it is probably all LGPL or BSD/Apache.
With the OS being read only, and there being integrity checks on every bootup, it becomes significantly more difficult to do any real damage to a Chrome notebook. You can attack the server end and negatively impact users, but there is very little you can do to the client. Personally, I am a huge fan of letting the security experts mitigate attacks rather than letting my parents install random crap and going over to their home every couple months getting rid of the latest virus from their machine, call me crazy. Privacy laws are extremely important in this discussion however, if people are to use the cloud everything, they should be assured that their data will not be accessed by anyone they don't want to.
This seems to be the common misconception, there is absolutely nothing Android can do that Chrome cannot, nothing - except being the subject of an Oracle lawsuit that is.
There absolutely no reason why Chrome can't be made functional on a tablet since its running Xorg and thus most of the work is already done. With things like WebGL soon becoming prime time, and NaCl, ChromeOS will become more appealing not less. I can already call any household in the US and Canada for free on my Chrome notebook, I can already create movies or run MS Office or Photoshop for productivity. I can already connect to every messenger service with voice and video calling from Chrome. I can already develop websites, or participate in many open source projects directly from the browser. I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing out on? Oh right, there is no terminal... computer users really care about that one.
It isn't two OS's, they're both Linux... it is two different UI's for two different use cases.
If they kill off ChromeOS, I will personally be extremely disappointed. I am sick of having to have Windows around to run half the software out there. I am sick of having to care about the plethora of API's you have to learn for each platform currently, or having to care about whether an app is compiled to use a particular version of the API that I have installed - else having to install a bunch of versions of the same API to appease the different apps... it is ridiculous. On Windows, they don't even bother, if its not a native Windows app - ie, Qt - every app just installs its own version and after about a month of using Windows 7 I had 10 versions of Qt installed.
As for storing everything in the cloud, have we not been instructed since the dawn of computers to backup everything we don't want to lose? You can get 1.6TB flash drives currently, so its not like there is a shortage of storage just because it doesn't have a hard drive.
What you miss by running it in a VM is that you still must load up the OS to get to the browser. It is simply not as convenient, once you're already there, it is more convenient to just load up the OS's browser. I have been using Cr-48 exclusively since the day after it was announced (google got it here that quick!) and despite having vastly superior hardware elsewhere in the house, I have not touched another system. I recently purchased a $600 computer and I'm kicking myself because I simply cannot be asked to use it when I'll have to wait 2 mins till the OS is usable. I just reach out, lift the lid of this machine, and by the time I'm situated, it is ready to log in and use. It is awesome.
As for what problem this solves, it simplifies computing vastly. It allows users to not care about what OS runs what, cuz everything will run on the web. It does away with lockin cuz you can access everything from anywhere. You're not having to run 20gigs of crap for the few useful tools Microsoft ships in its OS. You never have to wait an hour or more for something to install. There are so many benefits to this it is ridiculous, but they all stem from simplicity and convenience.
Its really as simple as that. Watch any unexperienced user on their computer, they will go straight for the browser, they don't care what else the system can do. Even if they're not in the browser, they are using a messenger service or something else related to conversation. Compare something like liveGO to any native messenger and the superior interface is liveGO, win for the browser. There are apps that are at least comparable to Windows MovieMaker and whatever the Mac has for basic video editing in JayCut - again a great app that shows off web capabilities. Not to mention Photoshop and MS Office both have web based versions. We have already seen demoes of 3D games that look great in the browser, and without having to remember what platform runs what games, that experience becomes vastly simplified. Sure "power users" won't like it, but what percentage of computer users do you honestly believe fit that bill? I had used Linux exclusively for 12+ years, I have 3 quite powerful desktop machines in this house, and yet I'm writing this from the relatively mediocre hardware of the Cr-48 simply because it is more convenient. I don't have to wait at all to get to what I want, I don't have a bunch of useless crap running in the background managing the interface and os services I don't wish to use when I'm on the computer.
For me, I think Android will eventually drop "native" apps, and entirely use webapps, with things like NaCl, it gives the developer more choice, simple as that. I believe the lawsuit with Oracle is only going to speed that process along. As web technology gets better and better, it will simply be inevitable that the web becomes the platform. No more porting apps from one platform to another wasting developer resources, and a lot of development already goes on in the cloud via Google Code and GitHub/Gitorious etc. I don't have to worry about losing data cuz my system crashed, I don't have to reconfigure settings cuz I changed computers, it is honestly a joy. For me, the only downside currently is speed, the web still isn't quite powerful enough to make some of the apps I've listed feel as smooth as their native grandparents. It is only a matter of time until even this isn't an issue, however.
People insisting on sticking with native apps are simply stuck in the past. If you want to continue being locked into Microsoft software because that's where your apps run, cool. If you want to continue being stuck with the lame excuse for an alternative offered by Linux, cool. If you want to continue purchasing Apple hardware at outrageous prices to get their software, cool. Personally, I want them each to compete on an even playing field, and I don't want to have to consider the multitude of application frameworks from one system to another. I do not care about whether apps match each other in look and feel provided they look awesome, and do the job I want. Everyone in this thread complaining about their preference for native apps really ought to look into what the web developers are already offering, and get on board with moving this platform forward.
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GPL states you must make the source code available, and it is, on developer.android.org
Depending on licenses of libraries, any custom interfaces probably don't require source code being shipped either, since it is probably all LGPL or BSD/Apache.
With the OS being read only, and there being integrity checks on every bootup, it becomes significantly more difficult to do any real damage to a Chrome notebook. You can attack the server end and negatively impact users, but there is very little you can do to the client. Personally, I am a huge fan of letting the security experts mitigate attacks rather than letting my parents install random crap and going over to their home every couple months getting rid of the latest virus from their machine, call me crazy. Privacy laws are extremely important in this discussion however, if people are to use the cloud everything, they should be assured that their data will not be accessed by anyone they don't want to.
This seems to be the common misconception, there is absolutely nothing Android can do that Chrome cannot, nothing - except being the subject of an Oracle lawsuit that is.
There absolutely no reason why Chrome can't be made functional on a tablet since its running Xorg and thus most of the work is already done. With things like WebGL soon becoming prime time, and NaCl, ChromeOS will become more appealing not less. I can already call any household in the US and Canada for free on my Chrome notebook, I can already create movies or run MS Office or Photoshop for productivity. I can already connect to every messenger service with voice and video calling from Chrome. I can already develop websites, or participate in many open source projects directly from the browser. I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing out on? Oh right, there is no terminal... computer users really care about that one.
It isn't two OS's, they're both Linux... it is two different UI's for two different use cases.
If they kill off ChromeOS, I will personally be extremely disappointed. I am sick of having to have Windows around to run half the software out there. I am sick of having to care about the plethora of API's you have to learn for each platform currently, or having to care about whether an app is compiled to use a particular version of the API that I have installed - else having to install a bunch of versions of the same API to appease the different apps... it is ridiculous. On Windows, they don't even bother, if its not a native Windows app - ie, Qt - every app just installs its own version and after about a month of using Windows 7 I had 10 versions of Qt installed.
As for storing everything in the cloud, have we not been instructed since the dawn of computers to backup everything we don't want to lose? You can get 1.6TB flash drives currently, so its not like there is a shortage of storage just because it doesn't have a hard drive.
What you miss by running it in a VM is that you still must load up the OS to get to the browser. It is simply not as convenient, once you're already there, it is more convenient to just load up the OS's browser. I have been using Cr-48 exclusively since the day after it was announced (google got it here that quick!) and despite having vastly superior hardware elsewhere in the house, I have not touched another system. I recently purchased a $600 computer and I'm kicking myself because I simply cannot be asked to use it when I'll have to wait 2 mins till the OS is usable. I just reach out, lift the lid of this machine, and by the time I'm situated, it is ready to log in and use. It is awesome.
As for what problem this solves, it simplifies computing vastly. It allows users to not care about what OS runs what, cuz everything will run on the web. It does away with lockin cuz you can access everything from anywhere. You're not having to run 20gigs of crap for the few useful tools Microsoft ships in its OS. You never have to wait an hour or more for something to install. There are so many benefits to this it is ridiculous, but they all stem from simplicity and convenience.
Its really as simple as that. Watch any unexperienced user on their computer, they will go straight for the browser, they don't care what else the system can do. Even if they're not in the browser, they are using a messenger service or something else related to conversation. Compare something like liveGO to any native messenger and the superior interface is liveGO, win for the browser. There are apps that are at least comparable to Windows MovieMaker and whatever the Mac has for basic video editing in JayCut - again a great app that shows off web capabilities. Not to mention Photoshop and MS Office both have web based versions. We have already seen demoes of 3D games that look great in the browser, and without having to remember what platform runs what games, that experience becomes vastly simplified. Sure "power users" won't like it, but what percentage of computer users do you honestly believe fit that bill? I had used Linux exclusively for 12+ years, I have 3 quite powerful desktop machines in this house, and yet I'm writing this from the relatively mediocre hardware of the Cr-48 simply because it is more convenient. I don't have to wait at all to get to what I want, I don't have a bunch of useless crap running in the background managing the interface and os services I don't wish to use when I'm on the computer. For me, I think Android will eventually drop "native" apps, and entirely use webapps, with things like NaCl, it gives the developer more choice, simple as that. I believe the lawsuit with Oracle is only going to speed that process along. As web technology gets better and better, it will simply be inevitable that the web becomes the platform. No more porting apps from one platform to another wasting developer resources, and a lot of development already goes on in the cloud via Google Code and GitHub/Gitorious etc. I don't have to worry about losing data cuz my system crashed, I don't have to reconfigure settings cuz I changed computers, it is honestly a joy. For me, the only downside currently is speed, the web still isn't quite powerful enough to make some of the apps I've listed feel as smooth as their native grandparents. It is only a matter of time until even this isn't an issue, however. People insisting on sticking with native apps are simply stuck in the past. If you want to continue being locked into Microsoft software because that's where your apps run, cool. If you want to continue being stuck with the lame excuse for an alternative offered by Linux, cool. If you want to continue purchasing Apple hardware at outrageous prices to get their software, cool. Personally, I want them each to compete on an even playing field, and I don't want to have to consider the multitude of application frameworks from one system to another. I do not care about whether apps match each other in look and feel provided they look awesome, and do the job I want. Everyone in this thread complaining about their preference for native apps really ought to look into what the web developers are already offering, and get on board with moving this platform forward.