By Brian Heater - PC Magazine - Fri Nov 20 Google has an important ally in its newly revealed Chrome OS<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/zd/tc_zd/storytext/246248/34159120/SIG=128qs1i1t;_ylt=AhNHWLq2cPW8kfPbYntgQPbiS5A5/*http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,0,00.asp?kc=PCYH104039TX1B0000663>. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu--one of the more user-friendly versions of Linux around--has agreed to contribute engineering to the project, under contract. "In the interest of transparency, we should declare that Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract," Chris Kenyon, vice president of OEM Services at Canonical, wrote in a blog post<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/zd/tc_zd/storytext/246248/34159120/SIG=1120ffsc8;_ylt=Asw7N_9qtCTKKKihWJ2FEt7iS5A5/*http://blog.canonical.com/?p=294>. "In our discussions, Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson made it clear that they want,wherever feasible, to build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention. This clear focus should benefit a wide variety of existing projects and we welcome it." While there are certainly some similarities between the two Linux-based operating systems, Ubuntu and Chrome are sufficiently different, Kenyon wrote. "Ubuntu will continue to be a general purpose OS running both web and native applications such as OpenOffice and will not require specialized hardware."