My impression from what I've read is that Jeff did work on a linux fork which was known as Google OS internally (I think there were even public news about google working informally on a "Google OS" in 2006-07), but that never really catched on and was never turned into an actual product. Years later, the idea of a web-first Chrome OS appears, and either a) someone reused Jeff's work to build the core and nobody paid much attention to it or b) both things have absolutely no connection and Jeff is mistaken in assuming his work was turned into Chrome OS.
Antoine Labour: I am one of the 3 original engineers on the project. The other 2 have left the company, so I will claim, if you allow, that I'm the most senior engineer currently working on the project.
I have never heard of this guy.
He has certainly not given any input on the project, to the extent of my knowledge. For that matter, the Chrome OS project itself, the one that ended up growing and actually shipped products, didn't exist in 2006 when he claims he invented it.
Reading his blog post, it sounds to me that what he's really claiming he put together bits and pieces of a linux distribution based on the concept of running off of a ram disk. This has pretty much nothing to do with Chrome OS, I don't see in what way his project could have morphed into what Chrome OS is today.
"I have a copy of a May 18, 2007 (not April) email from Jeff announcing his project on a wide-distribution list. It does not have the subject line "Google OS"; it's actually called "Guppy needs testers". Given that it begins, "I'd like to publish my Linux distro, called Guppy, for some testers to try out and provide feedback. Guppy is a little side project to build a Google distro of PuppyLinux for USB.", I'm inclined to believe it's the first such wide-distribution email. The phrase "Google OS" is never mentioned; neither are "browser" or "Chrome" or "Firefox" or "webapps". The closest we get is the single sentence two thirds of the way through that "I set up some desktop shortcuts to Google Apps", which is literally the only time the email mentions anything close to Jeff's claim above that "all of the functionality came from webapps; performing any operation on the desktop launched a Chrome window to one of many webapps." In fact, the email explicitly mentions that you can install OpenOffice if you want, which seems to contradict this portrayal a bit."
Google is a big place. There can be multiple people working on similar ideas (see Chrome OS and Android). If the projects are small it would be common for them to not even know about each other, at least for a little while.
If you tried to enforce that everyone who wanted to work on similar things had to work together you would burn a lot of energy arguing about "similar" and relatively minor differences in direction.
Sometimes it is easier and better to just let there be separate efforts and the market (both the internal attention market, and in extreme cases, the external actual market) can decide.
The news of Google OS around that time was almost certainly conflated with Goobuntu, Google's custom Ubuntu LTS install. The assumption was Google was prepping its own Linux release, but there was never any hint it would be made public.
If a single person at Google understood/reviewed the 'Google OS', and then later also authorized/reviewed the 'Chrome OS', then the strong form of your (b) option, "absolutely no connection", is impossible.
Even without explicit sharing of code/people/documents, the earlier project would have served as an investigatory prototype and proof-of-concept, that indirectly encouraged or dissuaded certain later directions. So these 'true father' disputes get into shades of meaning and clashing-but-valid perspectives pretty quick.
At some point you need to draw a logical line, lest you arrive at Linus Torvalds inventing ChromeOS since he wrote the kernel for it way back in the early 1990s.
I have no knowledge of ChromeOS history other than what has been published here, but from my reading of these things it does seem pretty disingenuous for Jeff Nelson to claim to have 'invented the Chromebook'.
The wording "invented the Chromebook" is aggressive, especially for collaborative projects that collect many contributions and work on shared themes. But, journalistic accounts and promotional bioblurbs typically dumb things down, in exactly this way.
And, if at any point Google asserts that Nelson's '662 patent covers the Chromebook/ChromeOS or similar products from other companies, then it's a defensible statement, at the level of fuzzyness that's used in these contexts. It should be interpreted as, "invented [key enabling technology for] the Chromebook"... like when people talk about who "invented the iPod" or "invented AdSense".
Speaking as a googler from that era:
It's much more likely Jeff did something independently, and it never ever got reused elsewhere.
In fact, it's very likely nobody working on chrome/chromeos ever knew about it.
We've yet to find anyone associated with Chrome OS who even knew Jeff Nelson existed. Perhaps there is someone, but there are few people left who could possibly fit that profile. Who's more senior than the original developers, Sundar Pichai?
The indirect relationships I posit doesn't even require anyone to remember Nelson's name, just for the chain-of-organizational-learning to exist.
I don't know anything about the Google org chart. But when Google OS was a project -- and Google financed the Nelson patent application -- who was he describing his work to? Did any of those people, or even people they passed ideas to, later help make the decision to prioritize/fund Chrome OS? If so, that's more than "absolutely no connection".
Did Brin/Page/Schmidt take interest in and see presentations about Nelson's 'Google OS'? And then later on 'Chrome OS'? That would also be more than "absolutely no connection".
Even if the 'Google OS' project was a mess and the main lesson that percolated down from it was, "don't do it this way", it could have been an important precedent... even if Nelson's name is forgotten. That "there are few people left" who might have personal recollections cuts both ways.
Note that these are all general arguments about evaluating why people's impressions differ, and how in founding disputes everyone may have a reasonable basis for their claims based on their own limited perspectives. I don't have specific knowledge of Nelson or these Google projects, and on the internet, exaggerations, hoaxes, and identity-games are always a possibility.
