Google bought CloudReady, the largest ChromiumOS distribution

Enlarge / CloudReady is a ChromeOS alternative built from the source available in ChromiumOS repositories, much as CentOS was built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code. (credit: Jim Salter)

This week, Google acquired OS vendor Neverware, makers of the CloudReady distribution of ChromiumOS. ChromiumOS is the fully open source, upstream version of ChromeOS-the sharply limited, cloud-focused operating system that Chromebooks and Chromeboxes run on.

The acquisition sounds great on paper-Google certainly has more resources than Neverware, including but not limited to the developer base for ChromeOS itself. According to Neverware's FAQ on the transition, big G will honor all existing license agreements and has no current plans to curtail availability of the free Home edition of CloudReady.

All of this good news comes with "at this time" caveats on every bullet point, unfortunately-which strikes us as a bit unnerving, coming as it does immediately after Red Hat announced that it was killing off CentOS Linux and replacing it with CentOS Stream.

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