So maybe Squirrel Boy calls


I’m not saying this conversation actually happened. But I’m not saying it didn’t either. He goes:

“So we’re developing our own operating system. Don’t tell anyone. It’s not that we don’t like Linux. We do. But we’re sick of getting hassled by the Free Software frigtards over the GPL and what pieces we can hold back for ourselves and whatever. So we’re gonna roll our own and really make it optimized for running the Google Global Data Center. Gonna start with BSD so we can own everything ourselves. And guess what popular user-friendly mainstream operating system that lets us be very compatible with? You read me, amigo? I think we can do some talking here. We’re gonna start on the back end, just our own data centers. But this could have potential in other sites, places doing utility computing for example. Or even on a Google appliance. Have you seen a company called nComputing? Take one PC, Windows or Linux, hook out a string of these little slabs and up to 30 people can share one machine, all over Ethernet. Everybody gets a screen, a keyboard, and a little slave box. Now imagine that the “host” isn’t in your office. It’s in our data center. Over the Internet instead of Ethernet. And the whole thing runs our OS. With our apps. And maybe some of yours. And maybe some of your middleware stuff. For sure nobody has done a better job of taking a Unix kernel and making it friendly on the top right? So what do you think?”

Now, once again, I’m not saying this conversation actually happened. And I’m not saying that there is now a team of Google engineers working with some of our OS X guys in a secret windowless building on our campus. But I’m not saying there isn’t, either. That’s all I’m not saying.