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Oh come on, was it really a surprise to anyone that Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't. All of their own sites, business and back-end technology is just as closed as Microsoft's.

Point 1) how is not pushing to mainline code "dropping out" of open source development exactly?

Point 2) The Common Android Kernel tree is browsable, and looks to be fairly easy for anyone to take advantage of. The complaint here seems to be that Google isn't putting in enough work to merge their Linux kernel changes into the mainline, not that they have failed to release anything in a usable way. I find it somewhat disingenuous to slap down an open source contributor for failing to do our work for us.

Point 3) Microsoft's services are just as open?! Great, where is Microsoft's instructions on how I can export all of my data from all of their services in open formats? Google provides that so I'm certain you're aware of where Microsoft publishes such information as well... Oh and while you're at it, how many open source projects do Microsoft projects contribute to? Python, Linux, and dozens of other existing projects get updates from Google and they've released more open source software of their own making than anyone else.

So, what company have you been watching that confused you so badly that you thought Google wasn't the single largest benefactor open source has?

The largest challenge to openness stares us in the face every day, and nobody seems to notice: Much of our data is stored in proprietary servers controlled by private companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

While I cannot speak for Facebook and Twitter (nor do I speak through them because of my mistrust), but I do know that people at Google have noticed, which is why a team there has developed the Data Liberation Front.

Please check them out at: http://dataliberation.org/

To get you started, here is their mission statement:

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

The only thing I think Google is missing is a way to export all your Google information into a data file you can upload into someone else

As previously discussed, they are working on that. It's not a complete, one-click solution yet, but for instance since releasing it they've added the possibility to export all Google Docs documents to a single archive - previously it was per-document only.

This is not about FOSS, it's about not getting locked in and being stuck with legacy proprietary data. I'd say Google is on the right track with this site: http://www.dataliberation.org/

Indeed, privacy concerns are an interesting straw man here. The fact of the matter is that pretty much nothing on the internet is truly private. Even if Bing has a better written privacy policy it doesn't really follow that they'll actually be more respectful of their customers privacy than Google. If you have sensitive information that you don't want a 3rd party to have access to on the internet, then don't put it on the internet- the very act of doing that means the information won't be private anymore. 99.9999% of users don't care if Google knows they enjoy watching the Wire or what words people didn't know because they searched for its wiki page or what journal articles I look up on Scholar or what companies I've recently read about and decided to look up on finance. In fact most of the people I know that use Google services heavily are more than happy to share that kind of irrelevant information if Google sees some value in it and can use revenue indirectly generated from that to provide us with amazing products like Reader, Groups, Gmail, Android, Code, Scholar, Finance, Books, etc etc etc. In conclusion, information on the internet is not going to private regardless of whose search engine you use or how kitten-friendly their privacy policy is. At least Google has a decent track record of being respectful about your 'private' data while working towards as close to an ideal privacy scenario as it would be possible to get online.

Still, Google keeps introducing interesting new technologies based on open standards, open sourcing them, and making data export easy (just look at the new "dowload all" button on GDocs)[1]

So what? Why are we so quick to absolve Google simply because they throw around "open source" all over? I just finished reading how Google bought EtherPad only to shut it down.

But that's OK, they're going to open source the code. Yes, it's good for Google--they get to make their Wave platform work. Yes, it's good for AppJet--they make some money.

But is it good for the EtherPad users? I'm not hearing that. Google isn't putting all the features of EtherPad into Wave. It just does some cool things they wanted. EtherPad users were only appeased after they were first outraged by the initial transition proposal. The rest? Dumped. Sure, someone can come along and rebuild it themselves, but does that actually happen? Are highly-skilled, creative developers going to glom on to owning and developing code for this when the next thing is out there?

I will admit, I was a Google fanboy for a long time. They really seemed genuine about "do no evil". But the comparison above with Microsoft and IBM ten years before seems all too predictive of Google in the next ten years. Apparently there is nothing new under the sun and everything comes full circle and only with age do you gain the perspective to see it. It's no fun being old. I want to be young and naive again.

There have been maybe ten stories about Google becoming "the evil empire" in the last week or so. It seems to be a running theme right now.

Still, Google keeps introducing interesting new technologies based on open standards, open sourcing them, and making data export easy (just look at the new "dowload all" button on GDocs)[1]. Heck, Wave is open source and federated. This doesn't even begin to cover the help they give FOSS through GSoC.

Once Google stops being open and starts trying to lock me into their services, then I'll be worried (until then I just make regular back-ups). As it is, they recommend Firefox and IE8 alongside Chrome, rank Flickr above Picasaweb in search, and support Mac and Windows more than they do their own ChromeOS. Can we seriously compare that to IBM's deeds of the 70s or MS's in the 80s and 90s?

People keep screaming "evil," but I'm just not seeing it. They're being "nicer" than any other multi-billion corp I can name.

"Casual people" will learn. Once bitten, twice shy. Just as anyone who bought DRM'd AAC files from iTunes learned, the first time they tried to play them on a non-Apple device.

Yes, it's about user stupidity. And that's exactly what Google is going for (and MS too).

Google is going out of its way to make exporting easy - http://www.dataliberation.org/. I haven't looked at MS's offerings.

You're right that an unethical provider of cloud services could lock its customers in. I don't believe Google is doing that.

This is absolutely a valid concern and it should be one of the criteria when you pick a service or program to use.

Luckily Google makes a large effort to make sure you can move away without any problems or much effort, to use your docs example:
http://www.dataliberation.org/google/google-docs

Short summary: Select docs (or select all), click export, select your preferred file formats (OpenOffice, PDF, MS Office, etc) and click ok

That's not to hard is it? Sure doesn't feel like lock-in to me

As the other poster pointed out, Google makes a serious commitment to not locking you in, so much so that there's an internal team that works with all product groups to make sure the end users retain those essential freedoms, the result of that is available at http://www.dataliberation.org/

I personally know of no other company that has such an initiative (would be awesome to see MS do the same though, but somehow I'm not entirely hopeful that we'll see that day).

So what exactly are you basing your information on? I mean, I know it's the year of 'bashing Google' in Chinese astrology or something, but I mean cmon, lets keep some facts in the discussion or all we're doing is random trolling

http://www.dataliberation.org/

Restrict freedom? You do know that Google has committed themselves to be open, and even have a "data liberation" initiative to ensure that you can take your data away at any time you want?

http://www.dataliberation.org/

They're not exactly your typical corporation.

believe it or not there is an icon for Hotmail there as well as Yahoo, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter and the rest is Google apps

Why does this surprise you? Android, another Google-authored operating system (but for smartphones as you likely already know), comes with bookmarks in the browser for all sorts of non-Google properties.

What's with this cynical belief that Google is so self-serving?

Your statements are similar to those who believe Google tries to lock users into its services without ever having visited The Data Liberation Front.

Are you jealous of Google's success or something petty like that?

...with another OS from a giant company that's trying to tie all its services together to lock you in.

Never heard of The Data Liberation Front, I presume?

All this talk about the AppStore misses the point. You're dealing with handset manufacturers. They've always been BDSM. The real walled garden is Facebook, Twitter, and yes Google. (All though to their credit, Google did announce some form of data portability, but I wonder about its practicality.) It's cloud applications (whatever those are). It's the fact that for a variety of our personal tasks now, we must rely on others to run them. The data has gotten too big, and we've lost control.

If you think Google is going to rescue you from Apple, you're sorely mistaken. Apple is a niche. Google is the new Microsoft. They're the behemoth that is looking to control the world now. Haven't you ever wondered what Google Toolbar, GMail, GoogleApps, Wave and all the like are for? They're to slurp everything into their datacenter and then turn around and sell you things.

We've moved from from open standard, and ubiquitous email to writing on walls on Facebook. What did it give us? Twitter is popular for some reason, but not only are you arbitrarily limited to 140 chars, but all your status updates get locked away. Why are photos being uploaded back behind walls where are data checks in, but never checks out. Supposably it's more convenient, but it's nothing that RSS couldn't give you. Maybe there needed to be some sort of service that provided RSS for the masses, a turn key simple blog and photo gallery in one place, but it's all locked away, and I suspect we lost something. And yet if we think about leaving, we are giving up the ease of communicating with our more distant social network.

Facebook is here to stay, and I suspect that our data will never be the same.

It's not as much of an issue. You might be using a product for which Data Liberation Front hasn't gotten to, but Google does have people working on any of those applications to make it possible to make ones own back up. I'm not sure what specifically triggered that, but I keep a backup of any important information on my computer which is backed up to my local backup mirror and remotely.

Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between.

Mentioning Google specifically may not be terribly helpful with their Data Liberation Front project...

And with the APIs available for Twitter and Facebook it probably wouldn't be too hard to dump most of the important information to some kind of file.

Or is he talking more about the Amazon-type cloud stuff? But isn't that already fairly portable? Amazon is just running a pile of VMs running Linux/Windows/Apache/MySQL/whatever...

Granted, there's all sorts of hickups and loopholes and oddities with various hosted/cloud services right now... But I haven't seen anything any worse than the vendor lock-in you get with a lot of software you run on your very own hardware.

http://www.dataliberation.org/

Join the Data Liberation Front! Throw off your shackles! Data wants to be free!

Clearly Asay doesn't know about Google's internal team specifically working on ways to get your data out of the cloud. http://www.dataliberation.org/home specifically details what data you can pull from each of Google's services and how to do it. They concede they haven't "liberated" all the data from every service, but they're working on it.

Can only say one thing to this: http://www.dataliberation.org/

You postulate a chain of logic where manufacturers would completely lock down their products, in the absence of legislation. This is possible, but not inevitable. Unconstrained market forces, in my opinion, would lead in the opposite direction. For an example, see http://www.dataliberation.org/ and http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/09/14/1859216/Google-Data-Liberation-Group-Seeks-To-Unlock-Data?from=rss

You mention lack of competition due to high barriers of entry. These are almost entirely created by the government. Big corporations love regulations, because it is a way for them to lock out new entrants. Another example: Vehicle manufacturers cannot sell directly to customers, they have to set up a dealer network. Disintermediation is not allowed.

Yes, I am a Libertarian.

I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker.

I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export.

There are some caveats on this KML export, for instance you're not allowed to bulk export data: "Also, you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude coordinates."
This is a vague limitation; can I get all my tens of bicycle paths back and what about the tens or hundreds friends of me did etc.
I do understand that entering 'public' data (where roads are) is different from private data (gmail). So the DLF is doing a good job on the latter, but I'm curious about the former: user contributed public data. I can see the result of an added road by user X, so why can I not access the raw data?
There is an interesting discussion going on on Ed Parsons (google) blog http://www.edparsons.com/2009/09/liberating-your-my-maps-data/

I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker.

I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export.

These are legal problems, not technical problems, retard.

I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker.

I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export.