Google And Open Source

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."

Comments

Sponsorship doesn't imply stewardship

[ortcutt]

sponsor (verb, trans): provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)

Nope. Nothing about stewardship there.

Re:Money's not enough ... but it sure helps

[Draco_es]

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...

Re:Release pagerank

[zopu]

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Both of these papers are extremely outdated, but the PageRank ranking function is by no means a secret.