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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."
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I cannot trust them because in the United States a public corporation is required by law, first and foremost, to do what is in the best interests of shareholders which generally means anything which legally maximizes profits.
So what you're saying is that you don't trust them because you have no idea what the law actually says, or how corporations actually work?
Your name wouldn't happen to be Kyle Mortensen would it?
A publicly-traded company is required to maximize shareholder value in accordance with its prospectus.
Before a company goes public, it produces a prospectus. The prospectus details the business plan of the company, as well as its philosophy and self-imposed restrictions. It is the responsibility of the investor to read and understand the prospectus before investing. If the prospectus states that the company will place customer loyalty above short-term profit, then any lawsuit based on "the company didn't maximize short-term profit because they weren't pricks to their customers" will fail.
HTH.