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Google About Openness
sopssa writes "Several sites, including TechCrunch and The Register, are reporting about an email Google's VP Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. 'At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyone's benefit."
We want systems to be open, so that we can freely use them, but we will keep our own system proprietary. Where Google makes Open Source, it does so to disrupt other people's business, so that Google can continue to use open infrastructure. Sure, it's good business sense, but spare us the "we are the good guys" bullshit.
What are these Google Legs you spreak of?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
These guys crack me up. Any day now there will be video of Schmidt dancing around, chanting "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
Say Google opened up their search and advertising code. The result? Very little would change about the internet.
The massive hardware deployment that is at the heart of Google isn't going to be open, so only a few companies would have any real chance of utilizing their search code in a way that would compete with them. Same for Advertising (except you also have to have the monetary infrastructure for dealing with all of the customers and payments that take place). So maybe Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a few more companies would see some benefit from being able to pick the brain of the prime Google properties. The rest of the web would probably see some improvements in site searches, but probably no better than you get searching a specific site using Google today.
The biggest benefit would easily be non-web websites such as internal sites. These can probably already benefit for a reasonable cost through Google's search appliances, though.
Why should they open up everything? They're open in areas that aren't their primary business. That doesn't mean that in order to claim openness, they suddenly must give away the technology behind their core business. Open takes many forms: it can be a matter of publishing source code (as they do for many products) or interoperability specs (as they also do). The fact that they remain closed about other areas does not affect how and where they *are* open.
That We know what's best somehow reminded me of "We are the Borg. Lower your shields. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
We are seeing a shift from private to public, closed to open, secretive to transparent and it's all because of a far more efficient and cheap ways to communicate. The act of communication is so fundamental to how we relate to the world, that when you change the way you communicate, you change the shape of everything in the world.
Corporate structures will change drastically. How, exactly, no one know. Can corporations like Google still exist 50 years from now? Will there be any need for massive bureaucracies any more or will the opposite happen, and just a handful of bureaucracies be able to control everything?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
After using Wave preview for the past couple months, I don't think I like where Google is heading.
There is a lot of good and a lot of bad.
GWT so far is bad. Development of the compiler is slow and forces developers to target specific supported browsers. So far none of which except Google's own Chrome are well supported. Wave preview in any other browser than Chrome is horrendously slow and crashes regularly. Besides, who wants to go back to the mid-90s and have to put warnings on their site, "This site optimized for Chrome at 1900x1080"?
Yet they do contribute to a lot of open source projects and have made a number of their projects open source themselves.
This sounds more like idealism than anything. Their company is too big for any one stake-holder to steer the ship towards a single goal or at least navigate by certain guiding principles.
So to sum up, "meh."
To the extent that that is true, it's great.
But openness is also getting abused to mean its exact opposite.
Doublespeak! Beware openwashing
Why do we hold Google to a higher standard? Would any other company 1/2 their size share 1/3 as much as they do? No.
I heart you G00gl3. xoxo.
~Mekkah
CmdrTaco, kdawson(troll), all of you, need to chill it with the rhetoric. If I wanted sensationalist news I could easily hit up Fox or MSNBC. Of course while it's important to hold Google accountable once in awhile. But they are one of the biggest supporters of open source, and all you guys do is beat them over the head with a stick as if they are Microsoft. Sometimes I wonder if the editors here ever really grew up. Open source is great. It's one of the great achievements in human cooperation. But to belittle anyone who doesn't take the plunge 110% is really small of you guys. It's a good thing there are parts of the OSS community that welcome partial contributions with more open arms than do Slashdot editors.
I'm not sure this will go over well, but I have karma to burn and sometimes we need to turn the mirror back on ourselves.
meep
Google definitely wants us to be open with our information!
this kind of memo by a vp, talking about 'open' like this. i think this is a serious indicator. totally in contrast to the behavior we see from other companies. i appreciate this.
the comment of the poster is hilarious btw - google values openness will google open its search engine. if google did that, it would lose all the power it can use to enforce the openness, and 'closed' would prevail, through the efforts of stranglehold corporations opposing them. no, opposing 'us', for i am on the same side with google apparently, from what i understand from that vp's memo.
regardless of how much one wants to be open, one should always employ wisdom.
Read radical news here
i am a developer. leave aside the many measures google have taken to empower INDIVIDUALS, like enabling individual websites with adsense system and giving them the power to generate revenue whereas all of the big boys were treating small publishers as shit, google by itself provided many useful tools to aid us developers in the act of development. its so much that some of their accessories are invaluable additions to the dev environments and software we use now.
i think you confused them with another company, which treated everyone but the big buck like shit, for over 20 years.
Read radical news here
This is not about FOSS, it's about not getting locked in and being stuck with legacy proprietary data. I'd say Google is on the right track with this site: http://www.dataliberation.org/
Open Privacy! A new standard for making access to your private information easier across all platforms...
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Aren't they responsible to their shareholders? Isn't there potentially more profit here than in the history of man (except maybe oil)?
I think Google Jonathan Rosenberg is talking about that when he says that it is becoming Rashoman-like.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system?
No, actually, we aren't. The email says so, in the fourth paragraph under Open Technology > Open Source:
While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to "game" our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.
It's submitted by sopssa (troll) :p
Isn't Hadoop an open version of part of their back end?
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
I think Google means having hardware YOU OWN be open. Their servers are their own property.
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved."
When most of your "profits" don't come from "open systems" but rather advertising, where you data mine every piece of information and sell it off in order to sustain the rest of the business which is "open". Sure it's open, because if they charged fees for closed programs, nobody would develop for them.
Only Apple can do that lately :(
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
If you think the anti-Google Schtick is out of control here then whatever you do don't read The Register your head will explode.
...and it's aiming for another of my crevices. Surely it means no evil?
Mod parent up. The 'have a stick, will hit anything that moves, before properly investigating' shtick is getting very old.
to belittle anyone who doesn't take the plunge 110% is really small ...
Well said, MEEP MEEP! (Here, here!)
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
> all you guys do is beat them over the head with a stick as if they are Microsoft
They're the Microsoft of search and online advertising. Their open source efforts are just a gimmick like Microsoft's.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
"ext:pdf" or "filetype:pdf", I mean.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why not release old code from a few years back then under some restrictive license preventing use in competition without releasing code back?
No, I think while Google certainly does open source a lot of stuff, the above assessment is almost accurate. It's not so much to disrupt other business though (although sometimes that might be a part of it). It's more like their bread & butter is truly search, advertising, and massive scaling of infrastructure. That's where they make money and need their competitive advantage, so they believe, rightly or wrongly, that that needs to remain their secret sauce.
The sooner we start using AGPL for every piece of FOSS code, the better. IMO it's the only way to avoid FOSS being marginalized by big companies like MS or Google.
USA has a monopoly on IT (MS has the PC section, Google the Internet search market), and those companies are both killing FOSS. MS fights openly (the viral factor anyone?), while Google is fagoziting FOSS, (Android vs Linux kernel), (Chrome vs Safari).
What's in a sig?
google likes open source in that they exploit it and use it for their own ends
google does not like making their own content open source however
google is now just another evil company, and they're not fooling anyone.
"Slashdot's anti-Google schtick?" What Slashdot are you reading? So one or two slightly critical articles means Slashdot is anti-Google?
Slashdot has been unrelenting Google's cheerleader for almost a decade. The reason for criticizing Google's lack of openness is to point out to people that Google is actually a closed source company that dangles free carrots in front of people to get them onto their advertising platform that will index all their emails, conversations, documents, and more. And we're supposed to trust the company because they said they're trustworthy. Do you realize how silly that sounds? Don't you think Slashdotters would mock the situation if it was any other company but Google?
Oh, give me a break. Statements like that guarantee an instant +5.
Now, the next "massive disconnect" is for Microsoft: if the .Net platform should be used for all Windows development (and maybe more), when will MS Office be delivered as a collection of .Net apps?
Is this claim of yours falsifiable? It seems that no matter what Gogole does, people like you are going to find something sinister in it. If so, then your arguments are just noise.
Yeah, bad rhetoric too. Opening up Google' s search algorithm may indeed make the code more secure. But the SEO industry isn't attacking the security of the code or exposing flaws in the algorithm. They're exploiting legitimate ways the algorithm uses to determine relativity. They know linking is a way Google determines relativity, so they create link farms. How would opening up the code exactly help this situation? Is there even a way to make a ranking algorithm open source so that this type of gaming is impossible?
Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.
I'd be more inclined to believe this if they did things like make the address book for Gmail easily accessible and easy to update and manage by third party applications. Yeah, you can export it and there are a few third party ways to do it but realistically your ability to synchronize contacts outside of Gmail is limited at best. I realize the reasons why they haven't done this but saying you want open standards without actually making the user data (the one thing I actually care about) open and accessible is disingenuous to me.
Slashdot has been unrelenting Google's cheerleader for almost a decade.
Yeah, google "Chris DiBona". Er, bing or yahoo Chris DiBona.
Actually I suspect that after DiBona went over, the /. editors were hoping he could get them jobs, complete with stock options, 20 percent "genius time" and food served by Pacific fusion chefs. But as time passes, reality sets in.
So Google, when will you be adding SIP support to Google Voice? Looking forward to it.
Vote Libertarian
I guess the problem is that Google is talking about how everyone should be doing something when it benefits Google, but they will not open up their core business. So why are they telling other people to? Of course Google should be criticized when they make hypocritical comments. Google is not above all criticism.
Clever signature text goes here.
Sounds like doublespeak to me.
I had to google google legs.
http://google-au.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-legs-burn-at-balmoral.html
Hmmmm. I was hoping to see some more feminine legs. :^( There's no porn like google porn.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
> all you guys do is beat them over the head with a stick as if they are Microsoft
They're the Microsoft of search and online advertising. Their open source efforts are just a gimmick like Microsoft's.
And how has Google locked YOU into using their services? How has Google stiffled the competition for search? How has Google business practices negatively impacted you?
Now I think that that's an interesting thing to discuss. Not whether companies should act against their best interest for the sake of public good, which is what many on slashdot seem to be promoting, but what is a viable business model as information becomes increasingly easy to exchange. I think that suggesting that companies should act for public good is promoting a system based on conflicts of interest that will usually result in self-interest winning over public good.
The reason that Google is so interesting is that they promote openness to a degree that few other tech companies do because it's in their best interest. If you assume that anyone should put your benefit above theirs, you will be constantly disappointed, but Google has discovered that in many areas peripheral to their core business they can benefit significantly by opening access to everyone and skimming ad revenue off the traffic. Opening source often pulls more people to the core technology, in turn generating ad revenue. It's important to remember that Google can do free thanks to ad revenue.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
What I would *REALLY* like to see open-sourced and/or available for private use would be the Google-Docs API's. I'm sure many companies are in the same boat as ours where we aren't willing to trust an external entity with our private information, but would *REALLY* like to have something like docs for online document collaboration.
I know that google sells advertising, but I don't see any reason they couldn't package and sell versions of "Google Docs" to easily be used on private servers. If they would, I know many companies that would jump on this. I've certainly be watching for something comparable that will run on apache etc, but haven't found it yet. I think that some of their model is flawed in that even open-source API's generally need to hook into google's servers. Information may want to be free, but our private records don't!
Except the things they open-source are useful as hell. Do you even know anything about their open source applications?
If their search algorithm doesn't take any sort of reputation or peoples' desire to actually see the result into account then that search algorithm sucks. If what you say is true then it's only a matter of time before someone will devise a better algorithm anyway.
Reddit.com does the same thing: they are open, except for their anti-spam. Yet they admit their developers still spend copious amounts of time dealing with keeping spam out. If I've got a boat and the only way to keep it from sinking is to constantly bail it, there's a big problem with how I'm doing things.
How much money have we spent over the past ten years to deal with spam? When do we decide to cut the shit and actually fix the problem using reputation into account?
Hell, even Bill Gates' old idea about an escrow system for e-mail (ie, you put some money in escrow up front and if I decide to read your mail I have the option of claiming that money; if you're a known contact that I've whitelisted then you can send without escrow, but one click is all it takes for me to put you back in the escrow bin if you spam me) would be better than trying to create perfect heuristics to filter the spam. We need to get smart about this: incentives need to change.
Now, I realize you'll say that people will just use stolen funds to pay that escrow. Then we should improve the security of the bank services industry, too (we should do that anyway).
As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant: :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ... :-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.) ...
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"""
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm
There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing
Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback
And actually do something besides compete and mak
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They're the Microsoft of search and online advertising. Their open source efforts are just a gimmick like Microsoft's.
How can they be the Microsoft of search when Microsoft is already there? (Hell, Bing?) Just because they are the biggest does not equate to acting like Microsoft. They have shown that the Anti-Microsoft approach can indeed and will win, yet everyone bashes them for it?
Gimmicks... please. I see a big difference in Google's contributions to openness and Microsoft's often forced legally , but yet "we chose to"
tactics.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
We want systems to be open, so that we can freely use them, but we will keep our own system proprietary. Where Google makes Open Source, it does so to disrupt other people's business, so that Google can continue to use open infrastructure. Sure, it's good business sense, but spare us the "we are the good guys" bullshit.
Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!
Can't you see the violence inhernent in the system?
I stopped using Google when they jumped the shark with China. I also don't like their attitude with not keeping things private for their users. They should make their new motto: "Do know Evil (until we get caught) - then screw you". And to think the founders were Democrat's, that just makes me sick! Does absolute power really corrupt?
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those that know Binary and those who don't.
Apple was the big white knight around here the first half of decade. /. was cheering them on for using *iux (even it was BSDish), supporting CUPS, and then it was cheering for Webkit. Then the mood changed about 2006 - 2007 with the release of the iPhone and /. went from being pro Apple to anti-Apple and Google replaced them as the great white knight of opensource. Like Apple, that's been going on for 3 - 4 years, so now it's time for the mood to change to Google being the next evil(tm) company on /. /. is no different than any other media: build something up so it's more fun to rip them apart later.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I am not drinking this kool-aid thanks. The only thing open about the internet is people's personal information, credit card numbers, etc. What would open sourcing google's search algorithmn do? It would show everyone how crappy it is and how being reliant on a search engine's results is pretty insane. There is no context to Google's results or Bing's results, etc. SEO Marketing is gaming the search algorithms already and it is an entire industry. Sure it is more advanced than keyword stuffing in decades past, but it is the same damn thing used to game search engines as to what is really useful and what is not.
Does anyone want to count how many fabricated or outright false accusations have been perpetuated through the internet from a simple tweet? I have seen far too many for my tastes and it is because social networking and search engine's desire to be timely create an environment for it.
So yeah, open sourcing their search and ad code would be beneficial to all because it would help to promote better ways to perform searches, which has become the only way to find your way through the internet. So I would argue it is the MOST important part of being open in order to have a free and open internet.
For less than the price of a Kindle, I can buy a pretty decent used IBM Thinkpad, which will do so many more things than the Kindle will ever be capable of. Sure, its bigger, but I can play games, surf the internet, listen to music, create documents, anything I can do with a desktop computer. Plus it easy to take with me. I can even (gasp!) read an ebook! in any format that I need/choose. And Amazon cannot delete my ebooks, and has no control whatsoever over my computer or what I do with it!!!!
What are these Google Legs you spreak of?
It's related to the famous back end that apperantly some people want to see opened. googlese.cx or something like that. Disgusting if you ask me, I really hope they keep that closed.
Our entire massive Net startup company with 150 million in funding is using Google's Wave as a fundamental building block of both our internal collaberation(email, instant messaging, document sharing,...) and soon to be company customer interface.
But, hey, some random dude living in his mom's basement sez Wave suck cuz it doesn't work in his crappy old browser of choice.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame"
You can always count on the bleeding edge stupidity of Slashdot and its posters to give a clear picture of the future of the computing world simply by counting on the exact opposite of the crap you clowns constantly spout.
is also never a good idea. one of which, you just made.
google being the spearhead of the push, or being accepted as one of our side does not mean that we are only relying on google. this was your half assed conclusion.
Read radical news here
there's something like that. corporate culture is created by the initial visionholders of a company. then, this affects their hirings. in the end entire corporation becomes something shaped with the vision, and continues to operate as such. there are numerous corporations which are maintaining a definitive culture over 100 years in europe. there are corporations which had their corporate culture shaped in front of our eyes, like microsoft. corporate culture makes or breaks corporations.
Read radical news here
This manefesto is some hardcore bullshit. Not just for the reasons that everyone else has been saying (as true as they may be). The thing that got me is that Google flat out acknowlegdges that there is a problem with the Android platform splintering, and says they are trying to avoid the problem with android. Well guess what? the only way to actually do that is pressure vendors regarding android extensions, which violates section 9 of the open source definition. Really, the whole point of open source is endless variation and user control (which includes vendor control. Under the open definition vendors have every right to add proprietary and closed add ons), neither of which google apparently wants Android to have. The truth is this: Google doesn't actually want Android to be open. The whole compatibility issue would solve itself instantly if they closed it, even a little. This manifesto is as much about rewriting the definition of open as anything else. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that they have self-labeled themselves the messiah of open, they would have dropped this charade a long time ago and closed Android, since it benefits everyone involved, including handset vendors and (in 99% of cases) consumers. I really can't think of any reason beyond the PR stuff why Google would want Android open, and I challenge anyone on the internet to come up with a good one.
Corporations and organizations in general exist because when transaction costs become to high, it may become more efficient to conduct business within a hierarchical, rigid organization, rather than in a merketplace (read Coase "The Nature of the Firm"). While the whole "digital revolution" thing reduces transaction costs in some areas, I doubt it will ever make organizations obsolete in all areas of economy. For instance in healthcare or law, the relatinship between agents and principals is determined by the enormous information assymetries (read Arrow "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care"). While they may be reduced to some extent, so far things like personal health records did not get much traction neither with patients, nor with doctors. Well, maybe we the information technology is just not mature enough, maybe we are not yet ready for it, maybe we will never be--and keep holding to the good old "trust relationship" with our doctors instead of shopping for them on the amazon. The point is, openness or closeness are not the ends in themselves, neiter are they good or bad. It is all the question of economic efficiency and common sense.
It is probably because they don't want some malicious third party developer to trick you into allowing access and then deleting all of your contacts.
Ha! What if some third party developer were to trick me into using an email application and then deleting all my emails? Oh wait, somehow I managed to use well respected third party applications with Gmail without any problems. Yet somehow I can't synchronize my contacts with my other address books... hmmm
Paranoid much? Ever hear of something called BACKING UP your data?
Also, if a developer makes a syncing contacts application, what if it has a bug that screws up all of your contacts?
Only a fool doesn't make backups. If you don't bother to back your data up you deserve the problems. I'm pretty sure the clever folks at Google can provide some means of allowing backups and even rollbacks of user data.
You've failed to grasp the article, just like the submitter and the Slashdot editors. Google is not proning open sourcing core businesses all around, they are proning an Open Internet. Open, Standard protocols and client software that lets everyone access everything on the Internet without any vendor lock-in (think proprietary file formats or protocols like Microsoft puts out, things like .doc, .xls or MAPI). A lot of Google's effort on the matter are very open, they adopt the W3C standards for their websites which then work on every browser on every platform. Their search business doesn't need to be open source, it's open the everyone. Best yet, if you want to switch to Bing, it's as easy as replacing your bookmark or search provider in your browser. Closed source is not wrong. It's when closed source turns into proprietary and vendor lock-in that it becomes wrong.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
One should not be "pro-google" or against it. From my point of view: (1) Google offers a fairly good service in web searching, and (2) it is very ironic they to talk about promotion of "openess" when they are not open. So far one should be worried about is the degree of privacy, and from MHO one should have control of their own privacy (exercising adequate rights of users into the Google's servers). ... in the future we will be surprised that this ever happened.
Last point of view is: the VP of any company has not the "right" and/or "last" authority in any thing said. Google has used to its benefit thousands of lines of code, they use our videos, our gmail email's information, databases from NASA, ETC., ETC. ETC., all this data has just been collected by Google and presented to us in a different form. It is really ironic, we are kind of dulls and perplexed of the amount of information, without thinking about the consequences Google will carry to us
The reason they want the internet open is because that is where they make their money. No other reason. Nothing noble.
"I won't reply back to Anon. Cowards. Show the courage to log in so I'll know you get responses. You won't waste my time."
And that is just so much rubbish from your inferiority complex. Sometimes people write interesting stuff but just didn't go through the trouble of registering. And I have an account, but generally never read followups.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
THIS.
That's the whole point of el reg though. They hate everyone :)
meep
So past biased journalism excuses present stupid editorializing? Perhaps you and I really don't read the same slashdot if you think they have been kind to Google in the past year or two.
Ah well. Don't worry, I don't expect much more than a false equivalency from someone with a link to Politico in their sig.
Happy Holidays.
meep
We are seeing a shift from private to public, closed to open, secretive to transparent
We are?
Then why are so many things that used to be publicly-run being privatized? Why are there hardly any public telephone booths, and everybody has private mobile phones instead? What happened to all the public toilets and public parks? What about the shift to DRMed downloadable media tied to an individual, instead of physical media that be lent, shared or re-sold?
This argument seems completely absurd when it comes to what is actually happening in the world, where the movement is away from public interaction and ownership, and towards private ownership and restrictions.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You just confirmed that they want anything that isn't their core business to be open, while they want to keep their own stuff closed. The stuff that matters for their bottom line.
Clever signature text goes here.
... everybody else is pretty much closed. So, if I stay with Google, my data is ready to leave, but I can't go anywhere else because it would get closed. I wonder if Google would be still so open with their products if the competition wasn't so dumb enough to screw their customers over and over again.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Never forget: Slashdot is just Malda's personal blog on steroids. Don't expect journalism.
Put identity in the browser.
They aren't telling other people to open stuff. This is an internal memo to Google devs. Google is telling its own devs to consider opening code whenever possible.
Ten years ago this memo would have been groundbreaking in its radical support of FOSS. Slashdot's pro-FOSS group would have praised Google (just like they fawned over IBM's limited support of Linux). Now people seem to want all or nothing.
Put identity in the browser.
The reason that Google is so interesting is that they promote openness to a degree that few other tech companies do because it's in their best interest. If you assume that anyone should put your benefit above theirs, you will be constantly disappointed, but Google has discovered that in many areas peripheral to their core business they can benefit significantly by opening access to everyone and skimming ad revenue off the traffic. Opening source often pulls more people to the core technology, in turn generating ad revenue. It's important to remember that Google can do free thanks to ad revenue.
I believe it is in all business's best interest. Consider what he said about a smaller piece of a much bigger pie. While it make take more spending, Microsoft could have made the world better if they would not have raped everyone. The economy's growth would have more than likely made them even more successful. They are too greedy to see this. It is true we have been disappointed, but now that we have logical men running a big company that is willing to lead by example, perhaps others will wise up. If not, they will get run over. It matters not where or how they do free. Free is better than Microsoft, who is now paying for your searches in Bing, footing the bill for the codecs in Moonlight, etc. Maybe it all comes out in the wash. But as long as they do things legal and not anti-competitive (which they haven't), then I surmise it will.
Microsoft could say Google is right and change their practices. In ways they have by opening up the few things not legally forced (and they claimed was out of the goodness of their heart...) But high ranking staff members pride may keep them from doing so, as is often with poor hiring and business ethics.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
You just confirmed that they want anything that isn't their core business to be open, while they want to keep their own stuff closed. The stuff that matters for their bottom line.
Not really, but so what of it if he was? What does that have to do with an open Internet being promoted and encouraging others to do the same? Aww, forget it.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
"How do we know that? History has shown us making the source available would jeopardize the rankings, and that would most likely be the primary effect... once it takes hold, there won't be anything else left!."
I heard a rumor that there were search engines before Google started and new ones created since.