Hank Williams gets it right. The article at drama20show (which thamer links) looks on the surface like the kind of pedantry that tries to show how smart you ar

Hank Williams gets it right. The article at drama20show (which thamer links) looks on the surface like the kind of pedantry that tries to show how smart you are by showing how dumb everyone else is. By this narrow definition that limits the OS to just the kernel, neither Windows nor Linux are OSes. They each include an OS, but they also include one or more desktops and standard applications. Actually, the fact that there exists a distinct word for the kernel - that would be "kernel" - is probably evidence that there's a basic problem with the narrow definition. BUT ... This is all just another pointless semantics argument. It fails to see what's really going down here: Google wants folks to write their applications for Chrome. Not for Windows. Not for Linux. Not for Solaris. For Chrome. That's the point. And that's interesting: they want the platform for writing applications to be their browser. Whether this means you can now call Chrome the operation system is beside the point.