Google Plans to Reveal Some of its Code

Andy Beal writes "According to Australia's The Age, Google plans to reveal some of the code it uses to great success. It says ' "The time has come for Google to "give something back", Wayne Rosing, the company's vice-president of engineering, told students while on a recruiting drive in Melbourne last week. "There have been a lot of conversations in the company in the past two months about (how) . . . it's time for us to give something back. So our technical director, Craig Silverstein, has started a project to look at all the Google code and start figuring out what parts of it we want to give back," Rosing said.'"

Comments

Re:What code ?

[guybrush876]

Don't need the code for that
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

Not code, just papers

[glinden]

In the article, Wayne Rosing explicitly says that Google is not planning on open-sourcing the Google code base, but that they will publish academic papers on their work. "I'm not saying we're going to open-source Google, because that would be a little dumb when we have these Microsoft guys making noise. . . We're encouraging the software engineers to submit papers where it makes sense, particularly where it is landmark work and it is really important that other people know."

Google already has published a number of papers on their systems, including descriptions of PageRank, their clustering architecture, and their high availability file system (the Google File System). Seems like this is merely an announcement that they intend to do more of the same.