Well I think this is the first time I am going to write something Googlish that Vijay Mateti (http://geek-tale.blogspot.com/) has not already written about.

So this one is about Goobuntu- the so-called Ubuntu by Google. I had been hearing rumours about Google's plans of getting into the OS business, and only this morning I read an article which claims the existence of Goobuntu. Now I would not talk much about what Goobuntu is, since Google itself will throw out innumerable search results for it. What is interesting to note is the following article on Mark Shuttleworth's (the guy who owns the company behind Ubuntu) personal blog at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/.

"I keep getting asked about Google’s “distribution of Ubuntu”, so perhaps this is a good place for me to say that as far as I’m aware there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that Google plans to distribute a derivative of Ubuntu as a Google OS. As exciting as that may be for Linux, it wouldn’t make sense for Google, and so far they’ve been pretty sensible about their projects.

Google uses lots of Linux internally, I imagine they also have their own versions of Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, perhaps even Gentoo and of course Ubuntu. So don’t read too much into their use of Ubuntu - it’s just part of the picture, and nothing to get overly excited about. The “goobuntu” you may have heard of is just a modified version of Ubuntu. Technically, there’s likely to be a “goobian” and a “goohat” too . The good news is that the guys there have been good about sending us patches, and we do our best to integrate them into mainstream Ubuntu and push them on to Debian and upstream.

I’m sure this won’t stop the rumours, but if you hear them, you can point here for a dose of reality."

I am sure Mark is not goofing about the whole thing, but then it would be a good thing for the community if Google joins the GNU/Linux bandwagon in a big way. Whether they meet RMS's criteria for Free Software will be something I would not bet my money on. ;-)