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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

The title of this submission: "Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS"

Quotes from the actual article:

"I'm somewhat skeptical of this."

"It would be nice if some Chrome OS folks more knowledgeable than I could shed light on this, because I truly don't know."

Analysis: The linked article has one developer (not "Chrome devs") confessing that he simply doesn't know what the facts are (not "den[ies] Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS")

Conclusion: Don't write your own submission headline, you will get it wrong.

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There are other Chrome developers commenting on the linked post, and they deny Nelson's role.

Yeah, I don't think that's very prudent of them. This happened seven years ago, and as they say, many of the involved people left. What if one of them did have a meeting with this guy?

Well, for starters, one of the guys who commented has been there since the beginning. As for the rest, this is very unlikely. Think about this for a second. They'd already started a project called ChromeOS, and they then decide to have a meeting with this guy about the idea of a web browsing laptop (or whatever)?

That doesn't make sense.

I have my own recollections of when/how the ChromeOS project started (since they asked for legal and open source advice ), and it pretty much matches other folks in that thread. I never heard from this guy, and I had heard from now-executives (they were just regular folks back then :P) about the idea/plan.

So, while theoretically possible still, it's pretty unlikely. I expect this is simply a case where a guy thinks what he did got used elsewhere, and it wasn't.

There were a lot of independently developed projects that did kinda-the-same thing back in 2006-2007.

And yet his name is on the patent: http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...

The patent in question has nothing to do with Chrome OS, beyond the very generic notion of thin clients.

What he said.

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