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Google And Open Source

Posted by Zonk on from the so-happy-together dept.

Nate writes "Former Slashdot editor, games programmer and consultant Chris DiBona talks about his new work at Google in a brief interview over at Linux Format. Most notably, DiBona points out that Google wants to follow IBM's lead in not attempting to control open source, and he also highlights the reasons why Google will never be a 100% open source company." From the article: "So I don't see the word 'sponsorship' as being appropriate. Because sponsorship also implies stewardship. We don't want to run open source, that's not who we are. I have to tell you, I've admired how IBM has gone about this. They've for the most part not screwed up: they haven't taken things over, they haven't managed to break anything, they've done a lot of good work. We're not going to use that as a model for what we want to do, because we're different companies, but I really want to get code out there, I don't want just... money. Money's not enough."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Sponsorship doesn't imply stewardship by ortcutt · · Score: 4, Informative
    sponsor (verb, trans): provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)
    Nope. Nothing about stewardship there.
  2. Re:Money's not enough ... but it sure helps by Draco_es · · Score: 2, Informative
    really, really helps when we can grab the source for drivers straight from the IBM website.

    As long you run SuSe X.X or RedHat Y.Y, with kernel Z.Z for which the RAID controller driver's (closed source) and NIC ones were written to...

    Sun, HP or Dell are better than IBM on compatibility, in my humble opinion...

  3. Re:Money's not enough ... but it sure helps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Well, for sure, and that's why we've given a bunch of money out to projects like oregon states OSL, Apache, the FSF and many others.

    A few other things from the article that need correcting: 1) not web 'scramblers' but web 'scammers' :-) and 2) The number 100 was a joke, I meant a number much larger than that but we don't talk about the number of machines that we release. For more info about our open source efforts and to see the code that we've released, see Code.Google.com

    Chris

  4. Re:Release pagerank by zopu · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank

    PageRank ranking function:

    http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/page98pagerank.html

    Details on the implementation of PageRank:

    http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/brin98anatomy.html

    Both of these papers are extremely outdated, but the PageRank ranking function is by no means a secret.