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

Release pagerank

[Anonymous Coward]

First: 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.

Then: We're never going to release PageRank [Google's trademark system for ranking web pages in its search index], we're not going to release things like that, because to release them would ruin them. If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank and Google search becomes useless. We don't want to do that.

Or, you could release it so others can learn how it works and perhaps come up with improvements or more sophisicated algorithms/systems that are rank scrambler proof.

But that endanger profits right? think of investors, lifesavings etc. Fair enough.

Re:Release pagerank

[realmolo]

Don't be stupid.

EVERYTHING gets cracked. If Google released PageRank, then they'd be starting a "war" with the search-engine abusers. A never ending war. Yeah, having it be "open-source" means that the community could constantly update it to prevent the latest abuses, but the people doing the abuse would just find new holes, since the source would be available.

Sometimes "security through obscurity" is the right thing to do.

hardware limitations

[slackaddict]

FTA, he states that some of the software would be useless to release unless you have "more than a hundred" servers in a datacenter. That's really not that many boxes nowadays. Besides, I don't need more than a hundred physical machines when all I need is ten decent machines and VMWare or Xen to run ten virtual servers each.

Hypocritical?

[Swamii]

From the article,

And then there are other things. We're never going to release PageRank [Google's trademark system for ranking web pages in its search index], we're not going to release things like that, because to release them would ruin them. If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank and Google search becomes useless. We don't want to do that.

The very same argument could be used from Microsoft's point of view. We're never going to release Windows [Microsoft's trademark operating system], we're not going to release things like that, because to release them would ruin them. If you release how you do the operating system internals, suddenly every hacker in the world screws up the code and Windows becomes useless. We don't want to do that.