I'm Jeff Nelson. I saw your thread and thought I'd add my two cents.
First, let me say that I love Puppy. I've been using it for years. Even at Google, I used my modified version as my primary dev box for 18 months inside Google, because in my opinion it was vastly superior to Google's other internal operating system choices for engineers.
I don't see how you think I "ripped off" anything.Puppy Ripped off by Google Developer??
First, other than a very small bonus for the patent (which is not a patent on Puppy btw) I never made a dime off this whole project. Second, Puppy is GPL and I didn't violate any terms of the GPL. Third, when Chrome OS was released, it was also open sourced.
Yes exactly. It's a Google naming convention to re-engineer an existing product and stick a "G" at the front. So Puppy becomes "Guppy".Clearly "Guppy" is short for "GooglePuppy". Shows the genesis of ChromeOS, and how visionary Barry is.
My product manager and I quickly changed the name to "Google OS" as that was easier to pitch to management.
To some extent. I don't want to go into any detail, as its certainly covered by the NDA I signed for Google. Google takes their NDAs and trade secrets very seriously.The patent I think may relate to something I think either a puplet or early puppy was able to do, involving booting over PXE.
I definitely have never claimed to have invented PuppyLinux. In fact I didn't even bring up the name "PuppyLinux" outside Google - or any other technical specifics of the work I did at that time, that Google might consider covered by their NDA.Exactly, which make this guys claim to having invented it even more ludicrous.
yes Puppy is released under GPL, so yes anyone can take it, change it and re-release it. But you cant them claim that you created it or that you 'invented' it.
Some people are confused why the patent doesn't spell out "Chrome OS" or the full operating system. Patents are not product specifications or design documents. A patent only specify the construction of one small, unique feature that goes into a product.
I had actually written two patents for different features in the Google OS distribution, but Google apparently didn't follow thorough with filing the second patent.
Yes, thats a very, very roughly accurate summary.I think what this guy is claiming is that his work on behalf of google formed the foundation of googleOS and ChromeOS and that others are taking the credit for that. He is saying that he put together the initial code that demonstrated the ability for googleOS to tap into online processing power and/or app delivery via an internet connection, and he is saying that this processing power/app delivery was based on google services and google storage.
I don't mean to say that I invented everything that goes into an OS, wrote the OS from scratch, or built the computer it ran on, etc.
I know some commentors are claiming there's no novelty, because Marc Andressen invented the web browser... so... it's not new.Yea except thats nothing new either.
But thats like saying, Grog the Cave Man invented the wheel, so the Toyota Prius is not new.
There's still plenty of room for novelty and innovation in the software industry, despite the fact that related stuff may have occurred in the past.
Now that we have Microsoft at one end of the dipole and Chrome OS at the other end - I hope we will see even more entries into the consumer Operating System Wars. Certainly, I don't think the status quo of consumer operating systems (or web browsers for that matter) is particularly good.
I'm just glad I was at the right place, at the right time, and with the right mindset, to realize the product vision behind Chrome OS, and push Chrome OS through at Google back in 2007.
Having access to an excellent GPL open source Linux distribution like Puppy Linux was definitely a big part of that. And the PuppyLinux community, and Barry Kauler in particular, deserve my thanks.
- Jeff
PS - Now if you want a piece of the patent bonus that Google paid me for this project... I'll buy you half a beer sometime and we'll call it even.