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.

Money

[saboola]

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


He can PayPal me any of it he does not want. I could sure as hell use it.

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.

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: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.

new name

[syrinx]

Oh, I thought "Google and Open Source" was going to be the new name for Slashdot.

I should have known that was wrong.. if that were happening, it'd have to be "Google, Apple, and Open Source".