Antoine Labour: I am one of the 3 original engineers on the project. The other 2 have left the company, so I will claim, if you allow, that I'm the most senior engineer currently working on the project.
I have never heard of this guy.
He has certainly not given any input on the project, to the extent of my knowledge. For that matter, the Chrome OS project itself, the one that ended up growing and actually shipped products, didn't exist in 2006 when he claims he invented it.
Reading his blog post, it sounds to me that what he's really claiming he put together bits and pieces of a linux distribution based on the concept of running off of a ram disk. This has pretty much nothing to do with Chrome OS, I don't see in what way his project could have morphed into what Chrome OS is today.
"I have a copy of a May 18, 2007 (not April) email from Jeff announcing his project on a wide-distribution list. It does not have the subject line "Google OS"; it's actually called "Guppy needs testers". Given that it begins, "I'd like to publish my Linux distro, called Guppy, for some testers to try out and provide feedback. Guppy is a little side project to build a Google distro of PuppyLinux for USB.", I'm inclined to believe it's the first such wide-distribution email. The phrase "Google OS" is never mentioned; neither are "browser" or "Chrome" or "Firefox" or "webapps". The closest we get is the single sentence two thirds of the way through that "I set up some desktop shortcuts to Google Apps", which is literally the only time the email mentions anything close to Jeff's claim above that "all of the functionality came from webapps; performing any operation on the desktop launched a Chrome window to one of many webapps." In fact, the email explicitly mentions that you can install OpenOffice if you want, which seems to contradict this portrayal a bit."
Google is a big place. There can be multiple people working on similar ideas (see Chrome OS and Android). If the projects are small it would be common for them to not even know about each other, at least for a little while.
If you tried to enforce that everyone who wanted to work on similar things had to work together you would burn a lot of energy arguing about "similar" and relatively minor differences in direction.
Sometimes it is easier and better to just let there be separate efforts and the market (both the internal attention market, and in extreme cases, the external actual market) can decide.
Antoine Labour: I am one of the 3 original engineers on the project. The other 2 have left the company, so I will claim, if you allow, that I'm the most senior engineer currently working on the project.
I have never heard of this guy.
He has certainly not given any input on the project, to the extent of my knowledge. For that matter, the Chrome OS project itself, the one that ended up growing and actually shipped products, didn't exist in 2006 when he claims he invented it.
Reading his blog post, it sounds to me that what he's really claiming he put together bits and pieces of a linux distribution based on the concept of running off of a ram disk. This has pretty much nothing to do with Chrome OS, I don't see in what way his project could have morphed into what Chrome OS is today.