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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.
These guys crack me up. Any day now there will be video of Schmidt dancing around, chanting "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
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.
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.
To the extent that that is true, it's great.
But openness is also getting abused to mean its exact opposite.
Doublespeak! Beware openwashing
actually, i think a lot would change if they opened up their search algorithm, since the first page on every search would be nothing but links to viagra and malware.
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.
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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.
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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?
.' 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.
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.
Just curious, what search terms are you using? I've found that adding "+datasheet" or "type:pdf" helps a lot in searching for pinouts, at least for things that are common enough to make it into digikey...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Exactly. It's even easy to opt-out from all of Google's things.
Well, perhaps. But Google's search is still better than anything Microsoft puts out. I consistently get shit results from Bing. When I want to search Microsoft's site for something, I use Google.
And Google still has an uncluttered start page.
You know what's funny is that 90% of the time when I do search Google for something, I end up clicking the Wikipedia link anyway. Wikipedia should start their own Search service that will include "not only Wikipedia, but other sites too" and it would be a massive success.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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