Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we're so excited about Google Chrome OS.

Update at 8:55PM: Watch the video of our Google Chrome OS event, which took place earlier today.

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director

Five years of introducing students to open source

We've just concluded our fifth Google Summer of Code, our flagship global program to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive. Nearly 2,000 mentors from 64 countries participated in the program. They worked to bring 1,000 students from 69 countries into the communities of 150 free and open source projects. We're particularly excited this year to have introduced several students to open source development that has a direct impact on social causes, from microfinance software to global educational initiatives to making government data more transparent and accessible. Three months and hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, 85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects. We'll be publishing more extensive program statistics and wrap up reports in the coming weeks on the Google Open Source Blog, so stay tuned there for more news about Google Summer of Code.

We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project. Finally, our sincerest thanks to all of our mentors for volunteering their time and expertise to help these students more actively engage with open source development.


Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Team

Growing open government with Transparency Camp West

(If you're interested in meeting the team of Googlers working to strengthen the public sector and civic engagement through technology, check out our Public Sector blog. -Ed.)

Organizing public sector information isn't easy, and companies like Google rely on the good work of open government advocates to access useful data. Last weekend more than 150 developers, NGOs, wonks, activists and government representatives from as far away as Russia and Israel gathered at our Mountain View campus for Transparency Camp West to discuss efforts to make governments more transparent and accessible to the public.

Sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization founded in 2006, Transparency Camp allowed open government advocates to freely swap ideas about a wide range of topics: voting, journalism, public transit, healthcare, citizen engagement and more. The theme of openness also extended to the Sunlight Foundation's board meeting on Saturday. While most organizations hold their board meetings in private, the Sunlight Foundation opened their board meeting not only to staff, but also to members of the public.

The "un-conference" format let attendees decide session topics

At Google we're inspired by efforts to connect people to the political process, to useful public information and to their governments — and we're eager to participate. To hear more about the different kinds of bottom-up change proposed at Transparency Camp, head to the Google Open Source blog for a summary by Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation.

This and previous photo courtesy of Heather Bussing

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

Supporting students in open source software development

Google Summer of Code, our program to introduce students to open source software development, is now in full swing for 2009. Over the past four years, we've paired nearly 2,500 "graduates" with more than 2,500 mentors from industry to academia, with some spectacular results: millions of lines of source code produced and over $15M in funding provided to open source development. This year student participants have more than 150 open source software and technology–related projects to choose from when submitting their applications, from operating systems to content management systems.

During the 2008 program, we had more than 975 students successfully complete their projects. Each participant received a $4,500 stipend and an ultra-awesome t-shirt to go along with their newly honed programming skills. We're particularly excited by the social ties our students form through the course of the program, as well. We've connected people in more than 98 countries, and hope to bring people from even more places into the Google Summer of Code community this year.

We'll be accepting student applications through April 3, 2009 at 12:00 pm PST. If you're interested in learning more, check out our Frequently Asked Questions or subscribe to our discussion list. You can also check out the Google Open Source Blog for regular updates on the program. When you're ready to get started, visit the Google Summer of Code 2009 site to submit your application. Best of luck to all of our applicants!

For an overview of the program, check out this video.



Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Team