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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.
How about you RTFA, oh yea this is Slashdot. Perhaps I have fallen hook line and sinker, but I think their actions speak louder than their words, and their words are merely clarification, which is spoken on as well. Since you are not likely to read it, allow me to quote:
"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.
So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don't just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement. Google Web Toolkit, where we have developed in the open and used a public bug tracker and source control system, is a good example of this."
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
They, in this case, being the author of the article and not Google...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The only thing I think Google is missing is a way to export all your Google information into a data file you can upload into someone else (or a way to give someone a "key" to your information to side load it)
If you read the article, they would agree with you. How do you like that? They are working on it and accomplished much already, but working toward more. See the Data Liberation Front (dataliberation.org)
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
The OSS code bases for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS are both called Chromium. You can do anything you want with the code basically, because it is under a BSD license.
Chrome however is a trademark. Calling you release Chrome means meeting certain standards. As you noted, Mozilla doesn't allow official branding of unofficial builds.
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
Last time I checked, Red Hat also has the same policies on branding, hence CentOS. Are you also going to suggest that Red Hat and Linux aren't OSS?
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