Google: Yes, the Chrome OS Will Be Free

Google this week announced its Chrome OS. The press coverage was insane but there actually weren’t many details. Yesterday Google came out and addressed one question everyone seemed to be asking.

One of the biggest questions people had is if Chrome OS will be free. Yesterday we asked what the main difference was between Google and Microsoft and a lot of you arrived at the same conclusion: Google services are free. However, we still didn’t know if Google would decide to charge for its newfangled OS, initially aimed at netbooks. The answer is yes, the Chrome OS is open source and will be free.

Vice President of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, who announced the Chrome OS yesterday, also addressed developers interested in working with Google: Pichai says that later this year, the Google Chrome OS code will be open source and to “stay tuned” for more information, which isn't much but at least it's coming, right?

 Unfortunately that was pretty much all the details the company had to offer people eager to find out more about the OS, which is a little disappointing. That said, this isn’t like the Chrome browser, which was announced a few days early because of a leaked comic but was completely finished. We expect to hear more about the Chrome OS as time goes on but at this early stage, it’s probably going to be a while before we get any really good details about the software.

Google did release a list of partners it’s working with (and it is LONG). Read more about it here.