It wouldn't have made sense to release Goobuntu publicly, since it was simply Ubuntu with central management and logging, integration with internal account syst

It wouldn't have made sense to release Goobuntu publicly, since it was simply Ubuntu with central management and logging, integration with internal account systems, maybe some hacky bits specific to their environment, etc. They've said roughly this much in past public talks about Goobuntu. All of that makes sense for an internal corporate distro at a place like Google. It doesn't add meaningful value over Ubuntu for external users, except for state-sponsored attackers who want a more precise understanding of the vulnerabilities in Google's corporate workstations. It seems like gLinux would have the same tradeoffs, except that they're going to push more of the broadly useful changes upstream. (Disclosure: I worked at Google in the past, used Goobuntu, and am a Debian developer. But I was not on the Goobuntu team or involved with the decision to switch to a direct Debian base.)