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

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

[b0r1s]

A lot of projects benefit from IBM's money, but as importantly, a lot of the Linux codebase benefits more from their hardware compatibility. We run a large farm of IBM e-Series servers (x306, x335, x336, x345, x346), and it really, really helps when we can grab the source for drivers straight from the IBM website.

Hardware compatibility: thank you IBM.

No one can own open source.

[BigZaphod]

Any person or company who contributes *anything* to the OSS community is helping it thrive. Google contributes in a variety of ways from actually releasing source code, funding summer of code, and even just existing as an excellent search engine making it easier for OSS developers to search for previous solutions to the problems they are facing.

Re:Release pagerank

[m50d]

EVERYTHING gets cracked. If Google released PageRank, then they'd be starting a "war" with the search-engine abusers. A never ending war.

Like that doesn't happen now.

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.

They would find holes anyway. The choice is between bad guys finding holes and good guys patching them, or just bad guys finding holes.

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

Not if you're relying on it. Because it isn't real security at all.

Not money, power.

[Cyno]

I don't want just... money. Money's not enough.

Yeah, you want power. The power to control people's lives. Hundreds or thousands or millions of people's lives. Through propoganda and censorship. That's what you want.

And how do you go about getting it? Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

Its all about trust, for me. Never about money or power. And I don't trust Google. They're too powerful to trust at this point, like IBM, a monopoly or a government. They would have to fully embrace the GPL or some other form of selfless act to be taken seriously. Free wireless is nice, but so are free cell phones.

With regard to GNU software, I trust the code. The license makes that easy for me. I don't have to trust the project leads or copyright holders. They've already given up their power by using the license. But Google isn't like that. They like the money AND the power.

Google Search Appliance

[StaticVector]

I'm suprised that no one has taken advantage of the availability of the google search appliance to get insight into the detailed workings of the google backend

That seems reasonable

[Bushido Hacks]

I'm glad to see that Google understands that they don't need to be 100% open-source or 100% commercial. Nor does it have to be 50-50. Whatever Google decides is there decision and is their own decision.