If their approach to Android is any guide, much of the work will consist of eliminating any GNU or GPL components from the (userspace) runtime environment.

Quit modding the poor guy down. See these two initial explorations from a core Linux plumber:

Android: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/100221.html

Palm Pre: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/111453.html

"...overall the Pre has the appearance of being a well-engineered distribution. It's recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't."

Why would anyone spend time eliminating GPL code in the userland of a system that runs on a GPL kernel and subsystems?

I'm not denying that they're doing it or anything, I just can't imagine why they'd bother.

Google did for Android so they could standardize around the Apache License for userspace. But who knows, they may not bother here. The netbook market is decidedly different than the mobile phone market, so they probably do not have the same constraints.

No one's developing for userspace—the "application" developers for GCOS will be writing web apps.

Or Native Client apps.

Yeah, they definitely prefer the Apache license, but the "userspace" in Android mostly consists of Dalvik and a bunch of stuff written for it/on top of it. Since they're trying to save space, they went with a smaller libc and don't include much at all in the way of 'standard unix tools'.

In other words I don't think they care too much about gpl stuff since they built their own UI and bytecode interpreter where most of the action is anyway...

This denies that Android runs on top of Linux, which is licensed under the gpl. Or that the Google search appliance runs on a ton of gpl'd code, all mirrored off of code.google.com...

You must be talking about some other comment, because I don't mean to deny any of that. I was merely pointing out that on Google's largest (public) OS project to date (Android), Google evinced a strong desire for a copyleft-free userspace and succeeded in building a non-GNU Linux distro. This is clearly a different project with different goals, so we'll see how it turns out.

The stated reason for that was that Carriers and Telcos wanted to build on Android and were put off by the GPL. (Though obviously not put off enough that they'd reject the GPL'd Linux that runs beneath it)

Google's approach to licences is far more nuanced than blind adherance or avoidance of any particular licence.

Notice that he says userspace apps will not be GPL'ed.

Webkit is LGPL, Chrome is based on Webkit, and the entire OS is built around Chrome. It's also speculated that their "new window system" is built on DirectFB which is LGPL.

Much anticipating that "new windowing system". If you wonder why Linux has never claimed the desktop, look no further than X.

I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning on that one. Lots of people complain about X in various ways, and while a couple years ago I would've agreed, these days, I'm no longer entering my monitor's vertical refresh rate manually, and X is pretty transparent to me.

And on the up side, it's nice to be able to run a GUI app remotely, though I'll agree that that's not winning over too many desktop users.

bendotc is right.

In the past 3 years X has improved tremendously. I recommend anyone check it out for themselves.

I wonder if people will be able to take this new windowing system and use it for their own purposes. That would be fantastic, if the new windowing system is good.

No doubt it will be a windowing system optimized for showing exactly one full-screen "window", and perhaps occasional modal dialogs.

I believe both Qt and GTK+ can be compiled to draw directly to the Linux framebuffer, if you don't want to use X (although they don't exactly provide much in the way of window management).

Yes, they can, but it is not as robust as X. Now and then you have to reboot the whole OS to reset the windowing system.

Is there anything better than X to render stuff to using Qt?

You could still use X with just window manager optimized for fullscreen like in Ubuntu Remix.

Yes, as soon as it becomes open source later in the year. I'm not sure how fantastic it would be, considering it would be Yet Another Windows System which only runs on these netbooks.

Instead, I'd be really impressed witha good windowing systems impemented using the canvas tag, something like:

http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

I think Lively uses SVG, not Canvas.

If it frees us from X, that would be an improvement - I am holding my breath.