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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."

3 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Money's not enough ... but it sure helps by b0r1s · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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.

    --
    Mooniacs for iOS and Android
  2. No one can own open source. by BigZaphod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
  3. Re:Release pagerank by m50d · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

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    I am trolling